


box cutter

by powercorruptionlies



Category: Marilyn Manson (Band)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Established Relationship, F/M, Gambling, Guilty Sadism, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lowercase, Masochism, Non-Linear Narrative, Self-Esteem Issues, Sex in a Car, there is not one happy moment in this entire thing, yes I overuse the weather/lighting/time/seasons as means of conveying emotional messages and?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 34,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25790053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies
Summary: when the maggots sprout wings and I'm paralysed in a sitting dance
Relationships: Daisy Berkowitz/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 5





	1. knots I

**Author's Note:**

> this dumb <3  
> now with a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvOc5HxOL9Yr-0TSpZnmU1ULoh6Met7f

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> back when the established relationship wasn't so established.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do I know my way around florida? fuck no, but did I hastily research the street names and clubs and cafes, regardless of whether they were around in 1992 or not? you bet! thank you halo21 for the prompt, and again, for the lovely feedback <3 this will be two parts.

the room is magenta and the club is too loud. scott - no, daisy - no, scott - no... daisy? he isn't sure to what extent that name is his own now. it still feels like a joke, some fun, rather than an ambition. _oh, I'm daisy berkowitz, and you are? -_ as if that doesn't sound completely bogus. marilyn - that's an easier one; he _knows_ that brian owns that name like you own a house, or a car, or four-track, whereas he was still picking around the name _daisy_ , owning it like you own, say, your dignity, or integrity, or your innocence - is loitering by the bar, pretending to flirt with the bartender who _scott_ can tell, even from this distance, is buying every second of it. he smiles. he wishes people flirted with him, even as a joke. he squeezes the plastic cup he holds by the rim between his fingertips, put off by the heat and the noise and the conducive nausea. 

as more and more people filter in, scott and the rest of the wallflowers get shuffled towards the middle of the floor where people lazily dance or grind or try to start some unsuccessful slam dance movement that doesn't take off, because the music's all wrong, and everybody's the sort of drunk where you're not energised, you're just _sad_. he and brian meet half way as he comes back from the bar, shot glasses pinched between all of his fingers and dangling precariously.

'teq?'

scott brushes him off and indicates to the beer in his hand.

'pussy,' brian throws out, as he usually does, and overestimates how many shot glasses he can filter into his mouth at once. somebody shoves into scott and he feels his eyes grow that little bit heavier. he considers telling brian that refusing to drink six shots of tequila isn't grounds to call somebody a pussy, but somehow it seems futile, and brian's already gone to harass some people that scott - oh, fuck it, _daisy -_ recognises from house parties and vandalistic excursions.

-

scott walks himself home and he isn't that drunk. he's tired, for sure, and feels oddly unsafe walking back down plaza real, and the cold gets under his skin. the moon is cut in half by clouds, which just look like parts of the sky that had been ripped out jaggedly, or discoloured. squeeze had gotten too much, as it often did, and too many people had been dragged into his sphere by brian and brad (when he'd eventually peeled himself off of the bathroom floor and added his hypodermic needle to the rest of the pile you had to be conscious of if you braved having a piss, or navel gazing in the mirror just as the club was about to shut and you were regretting ever going out at all). he vaguely wonders what he's missing out on, as brian et al. are invariably still there, maybe the only ones still there, causing the staff trouble, or otherwise having a civilised discussion about marxism, or the hegelian philosophy of right. it could go either way. scott doesn't have the capacity right now to go any which way but home. 

-

the next thing he knows, he's waking up the next morning, reluctantly, and gives the flat a once over, only to discover that nobody had bothered to come home. that isn't a totally objectionable state of being, and savours having free reign of the living room and kitchen, not shunted from the remote or the fridge for once. maybe he could stand up for himself one day, he fantasises, before finding the prospect too outlandish and settling to doodle mindlessly on a scrap piece of paper while good morning america plays dully from the tv, talk show hosts intoning about oil spillages and a throwback to the munich massacre, since it was its 20th anniversary.

this endeavour holds fast to being boring, and almost against scott's principles. as much as brian likes to park himself in front of talk shows, curating ideas, trying to spur on some sort of contemporary commentary he can utilise, scott doesn't find that sort of pleasure in them. they're trashy, sure, and sort of entertaining when some unbefitting incestuous pair toddle on to the donahue show, but it feels empty, and the drawing isn't turning out as planned, and the flat is sort of lonely in its silence and having nobody within it to harass him. 

he writes a quick explanation on a sticky note and presses it to the door of the flat, assuming, maybe erroneously, that brian or stephen or jeordie would care where he'd gotten to, before heading out down multiple flights of stairs in lieu of a functioning elevator and out onto the cloying morning humidity of early september, unsure of where to go, and why.

-

it's raining pathetically by the time he reaches main street, the cold water slapping the sun dappled concrete and producing that quintessentially summertime smell of sunshine and damp - sweet and mute and warm. putting a hand through his hair, which now reaches his jaw and gets in the way most of the time, he finds it growing stringy with the rain and frizzy with humidity (which, living here for so long, is nothing new, but still frustrating and unwanted) and he opts to head into the 24-hour cafe that was seldom a haunt of people like him, but he knows that they have jazz bands on a thursday night, open mics on friday, gin tasting on saturday, and strange avocado and egg concoctions on sunday mornings (to soak up the previous three nights' excitement, he figures). he'll never admit that he knows this rota off by heart to the other guys, though. there's something pitifully uncool about sequella, and yet scott finds himself drifting into it regardless, if only to get out of the rain.

the bell chimes his entry and the a/c is on. he stands in the narrow doorway for a minute, one foot in the sticky heat and the rain, the other catching a definitive draft on the ankle. there's a girl on the counter, restocking the pastry cabinets and wiping down pristine, white ceramic mugs intermittently. soft music plays in the background, it's not jazz or folk or country, but it's more... new wave. something daisy likes - something _s_ _cott_ likes, he distinguishes, daisy doesn't have a personality, much less a music taste - but is also frowned upon for liking. he approaches the counter.

'welcome to sequella, how may I help?'

the girl doesn't look at him, far more focused on lining up slices of carrot cake correctly. dark brown hair covers both sides of her face, slung down as she crouches by the cabinets. when he doesn't answer, a pair of deep brown, almost black, irises flutter up to him. 

'oh, uh,' scott forces out. 'a coffee?'

she brings herself to full height, which isn't that tall at all. 'what kind?'

scott, though cringing at himself, leans down to plant his elbows on the counter. 'what would you recommend?'

'truthfully, nothing. maybe a milkshake. the coffee just tastes like water, I'm gonna be honest.'

scott laughs, and agrees to a milkshake - a chocolate one, after a few more exchanges of questions.

'I'm gonna have one with you, don't tell my boss, okay? not that you would...' she mutters, loping a few scoops of strawberry into a separate blender. scott counts out two dollars and places the bills on the marble counter for her to take when she turns back around. 

'nice music,' he calls over the volume of a pair of blades crushing ice, and coffee, and ice cream, all at once. 'what is it?'

'the smiths.' she decants both thick, foamy liquids into two glasses and squirts a healthy amount of whipped cream on top. 'want any sauce?'

'what've you got?'

she looks over her shoulder. 'christ, I've never had to deal with somebody who isn't a regular. we've got chocolate - hersheys, so be warned - caramel, peppermint, strawberry, vanilla...'

'caramel's good.'

'decadent. nice call,' she tells him, swirling the honey-coloured bottle over the cream with one hand while fiddling with the volume on the speakers with another. 'leigh isn't here today, I've got free reign over the music. I don't have to play the fucking ronettes all day, you know?'

scott's chest twinges. 'yeah, I know.' 

'you got jazzy friends?' she smirks, sliding the shake over and pocketing the two dollars. 'don't look at me like that. embezzlement is hardly a crime.'

'my uncle's law degree says otherwise.' scott presses the plastic straw between his teeth and takes a sip. 'but I won't tell.'

she does the same, swirling the straw around until the whipped cream dissolves into the dark pink fluid, brightening it.

'but, ah, no. not jazzy friends. industrial friends, I think. they're not so new wave as us.'

'shame. what do they think of ministry's... adjustment?'

'love them,' scott almost gasps. 'how about you?'

the girl shrugs, stabbing the shake with her straw before tipping most of it down the sink. 'god, that's rich... eh, I sort of tuned out after that halloween song. total new wave disciple. my friends think I'm uber depressed. just because morrissey's ready to top himself at any minute must mean I am too, right?' she laughs, rolling her eyes. 

'oh? mine think I'm an uber sissy for liking the police.'

'it goes both ways, I guess. for the record, I do too.'

scott flushes, his chest pinching in on itself, but this time painfully, as if it was a punishment for saying the wrong thing. he tells himself that he's blown it completely, though he hadn't been aware that he'd had anything to blow.

'hey, chill out, wild eyes. I like the police,' she soothes, noticing his face falling.

he finds it in himself to look up at her. 'yeah?'

'yeah.'

he drinks some more, the shop standing complete silence. he has half the mind to abandon the drink and keep on walking down the road to get to the record store, and maybe find his flatmates, but something won't let him leave. 

'so, what's your name?' 

'scott. putesky. scott putseky. my friends call me daisy... berkowitz,' he admits, finally saying the words out loud - and then her brows furrow (he notices the pinkish eyeshadow beneath them, and the makeup dragged along each of the natural hairs, and the black mascara, and how long it makes her lashes look, and somehow she's shining from her cheekbones).

'like, the serial killer?'

'yeah. I promise, there's no significance behind it,' he tells her, holding up his hands. 'it's an act, I guess. I've been dragged into this band with a few of my friends.'

'no, cool, I like it. where's daisy from, then? just something that sounded like david?'

scott swirls the remainder of the liquified ice cream around the glass, watching it duck in and out of the buckled edges and combine with the syrup. he thinks, trying desperately to remember the drunken, high, conversation he'd had with brian when he'd been christened as such.

'agh... daisy from dukes of hazzard? or from the uh... the great gatsby, I think. I dunno. I didn't choose it.' scott looks at his shoes. 'what's your name, then?

'I liked gatsby. and dukes of hazzard. whoever chose it has good taste,' she says, absentmindedly rubbing a dishcloth over the nozzle of a machine. scott feels himself invert into himself with the knowledge that, once again, somebody prefers brian to himself, and she hasn't even met the guy. 'galilea,' she offers, holding out a hand; scott shakes it, and it's small, and soft, and her nails are long and painted a pale pink. 'just lea is fine, though.'

'pretty.'

'thanks,' she smiles, almost bashful, a veil which a minute ago wouldn't have seemed to suit her well, but now feels much like her natural self. 'I usually get some stupid queen reference thrown at me. I appreciate the abstinence.'

'didn't even think of that.' 

'good,' she laughs, crouching down again. scott hears the roll of wood and the rustling of paper and plastic, and in no time she remerges with a shred of notepad paper and a pen. 'forgive me for being bold, but I get off shift at midday. you busy?' she asks, scrawling down a series of numbers.

scott's stomach bottoms out, the nerves and adrenaline and relief and pride shooting from top to tail of his body. 'n-no. not at all,' he manages, promising himself that he'd find the guts to back out of band practice, just for today. it's so worth it, he tells himself. he might even tell brian and jeordie that he met her at sequella, and not care about the reaction, because what was there to care about? she's gorgeous, and makes his stomach flip and knot and squirm painfully like he's about to vomit from nerves and infatuation alone.

'oh, cool. here's my number, but I won't be in to get your call, I guess. so we can meet at silver palm?'

scott thinks about it, though he doesn't mean to stall, remembering the beach front and how the atlantic ocean laps against the land and glitters with the stars the moon at night, and how nice it'd be to see it in the sunlight, and while sober, and with somebody who isn't trying to push him into the water and hold his head underneath. maybe he won't tell brian where he's going, on second thought. 

'sure. silver palm. one?'

'one's good for me,' she smiles, for once not making eye contact with him.

he shoves some extra cash and coins into the tip jar, heading out of the cafe and down the street while rubbing the piece of ripped, crumpled paper between his fingers - when he looks at it again, some of the ink has smudged, but all the digits are there and clear as day, imprinting themselves into the forefront of his mind. he smiles at it, well out of way of the cafe, nearing the strip mall and ready to kill some time.


	2. knots II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> when the established relationship wasn't so established, II

scott ends up bumping into his friends (and bandmates, and roommates, a thought which made his social circle feel terribly stunted) as he leaves the record store and decides he may as well go back to the flat with them, as one seems a painfully long time away to be loitering around the strips. 

'where did you end up last night?' he asks brian as he falls into step with him, looking ahead every once in a while to watch freddy and stephen taking it in turns to keep jeordie upright. 

'jeordie wouldn't leave so we all crashed out in the alley behind squeeze. I mean look at him,' brian whispers, shoving his hair behind his ears to nod towards jeordie, who is now careening off the sidewalk. 'would you have left that twit? so, anyway, where did _you_ fuck off to?'

scott shrugs, and wonders when the best time to - ever so gently - tell brian that he was blowing him off for practice today; and, more pressingly, when he felt he could deal with the inevitable mixture of teasing and lewd gestures when he told them _why_ he wasn't going to be there. 'got bored, I guess.'

brian gives a grunt of concession, kicking an empty can towards the trio in front of them, which catches beneath jeordie's foot and just about floors him. scott looks away, looking at the shapes the dried droplets of rain had splattered across the black, dusty tables in the outdoor areas of the restaurants.

-

in the flat he fusses over his appearance in the bathroom mirror while half paying attention to a heated argument about why _land of_ _rape and honey_ was or wasn't a good album, and he can vaguely remember this same argument happening about four years ago (the outcome is the same: brian thinks it's a bad album, ergo, it objectively _is_ ). it's nearly twelve, and he can't distinguish whether the churning in his abdomen is from the prospect of going out with a girl, or from having to weed his way out of the flat for a few hours, which won't be painless by any means.

'scott, you don't look like a fifty-year-old man, what's up?' stephen asks him from the couch, counting out money from the 'for a piano' jar. scott casts a brief look over the notes and coins and decides that it still isn't enough, but he'll let stephen reach that conclusion for himself.

'date,' he says, clipping his words so the nerves and panic don't saturate them. he crosses the living room, doing his best not to get in the way of the tv, and fiddles around in the kitchen to divert his attention from the laughter in the other room.

'that's cute.'

'is this one of those jewish things? has your mom set you up with your cousin?'

'is she circumcised?'

'come on, she obviously doesn't _exist_.'

'oh. is _he_ circumcised, then?'

'daisy couldn't pull a guy _,_ either.'

'I thought you lot were dickless!' jeordie strops, winding up the electronic music box which blares some awful banjo melody. 

'scott must be,' stephen offers.

scott keeps his back to them, which is probably in itself a bad idea, and runs his fingers around the iron plates on the stove top. they feel greasy and have leftover food stuck to them, but the disgust is an ample distraction. the only way out of this is to plough through it, he tells himself.

'yeah, I'm just gonna go. I'll see you all later.'

'oh, scott - ' they all coo, overlapping each other. 'we're only teasing you,' one of them says, addressing him as you would a child that you think has taken too much offence to some degree of verbal abuse.

he tries to smile at them as he pulls his jacket on, already feeling too hot. 'I'll catch up on whatever I miss.'

'don't worry about it. don't get her pregnant, though, we'll have to cut into the yamaha fund,' brian drones, turning the tv up as scott closes the door behind him.

-

scott, in an unusual flash of vanity, checks his appearance in the hazy effigies of himself reflected in car mirror and storefront windows. his hair is fine, his clothes are fine, and his face is something he's grown resigned to, so that'll have to be fine _,_ too, he guesses. the sun spears the earth right through the middle, the only thing slung in the sky, cramped on all sides by blue. 

he gets the bus to the east of the city, trying to preserve parts of his appearance that walking in the heat would wash away, like the state of his hair or the aftershave there had been only a few squirts left of. boca raton flashes by the window with headache-inducing speed, the dull beiges and browns and whites and reds of the buildings blending into an uninspiring mess of streaks and reflections of the sun triangulating from the window panes. scott wishes, partly, that he could feel inspired enough to write about this place, to synthesise his aches and pains and the bottomless feeling of dread that hits him unexplained - this feels doomed to futility, as no words can lie prostrate in his mind to fulfil this desire.

that's one thing he and brian still bond over - words. it had to be, it's how they learnt to tolerate each other in the first place, even in the face of the other glaring differences and animosities that could _easily_ tank a relationship. oh, god, shut _up_ , he tells himself, pressing his fingers firmly to his temple and watching his face in the scratched and graffitied glass staying level and blank ( _'_ _pie-faced,_ ' he'd once heard brian call him, which apparently meant his visage was broad, flat, _and_ vacuous, as if that word needed another meaning) despite the humdrum of thoughts crawling in and out of each wrinkle in his brain. 

agreeing to meet lea suddenly seems pointless, another connection with somebody destined to take a downward spiral. who does he _really_ get on with? not even himself. but the bus is approaching the waterfront, and it's too late to back out now, and nothing ever hurt to try, right? wrong, actually, but that train of thought is dropped as he has to focus on paying the bus fare without dropping his money everywhere, and giving himself another thing to lie awake at night, glaring at the ceiling about. 

'have a good one,' the driver says. it's rehearsed and totally impersonal, but the sentiment is there, that some people might still care enough to say it at all.

-

dropped on east palmetto, he starts towards the park, until a sign grabs his attention - a florist. he tries to cross the road, but stumbles and drags his feet along the ground to pull himself back towards the entrance, a rounded white door at the end of a sheltered alleyway, lavenders hung in baskets from a peg either side of the door. this is stupid, he tells himself, walking closer to it. this is _so_ creepy, and way too... _nice_ (this opinion was quantified by the reaction he suspects brian, or stephen, to some extent, would give him if they knew about it). yet, he ends up pushing through the doorway, regardless, and spending most of his cash on a pre-arranged bouquet, large pink flowers interspersed with smaller, rounder ones, which he forgets the name of immediately. 

-

she's on one of the benches just off from the curved road heading towards the boat ramp. she's got her back to him, something he's grateful for, as he needs all the time he can get to massage the smile off of his face. _god, it's just the back of her head, you're not that starved, are you?_ but, of course, he is, and has to cross his leg over the other as a precaution when he sits down. 

'boo.'

'oh, hey, you,' she smiles, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. she's chewing gum, and offers him a stick. scott slides one from the pack, and pulls the flowers out from behind his back, half of him rather proud of himself for having the forethought to buy flowers, and the other desperately wanting to retract his hand and scatter the delicate, carefully curated plants across the park and pretend he never bothered. 

she stops chewing and takes her sunglasses off, eyeing the flowers. oh _, fuck_. 

'are these for me?'

'no, they're for the next girl I'm meeting, over in red reef. I just wanted to know what you think of them, you know, as a girl yourself.'

'hilarious,' she tells him, though not without a hint of affection. she wraps her hands around the verdant green stems, pricking her thumb on one of the left-over thorns, not quite concealed by the cellophane wrapping that bundles the flowers together. 'but, honestly, they're really beautiful, thank you.'

scott swallows a groan. 'you think it's stupid.'

'no!' she tuts and puts them between her knees. 'no, why would I?' 

'it's... forward,' scott says, internally lamenting the poverty of language, and that there never seems to be the right way to say anything.

'oh, please, you're talking to the girl that asked you out after _minutes_ of conversation.'

scott shrugs and remembers the name of the little flowers, scattered deliberately in and amongst the larger, bolder ones: baby's breath.

they sit in an unpalatable silence for a few moments, looking out towards the water front. scott sticks his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. he lets the gum sit in a grotesque, uneven ball on his tongue, biding his time to chew it again, hoping the anticipation would lessen the awkwardness.

'thanks for actually meeting me, by the way. I've been beating myself up about this since you left,' she says eventually, rubbing the flower petals between her fingers.

'hm? why?'

she pushes her sunglasses into her hair, the waves falling around it. 'it's just weird, isn't it?'

'I did wonder if it was a joke,' he admits, debating whether letting his guard down even further was the right move. 

'yeah. kind of fucked up joke, though. can't imagine doing that sort of thing to someone.'

'you should meet my friends,' scott says, grinning, until something sour settles in his stomach. 'or, maybe not.'

'I could've lured you here to kill you,' she says after a while. the magpies chirp and fuss in the trees surrounding them in a semicircle, drowned out by lucrative-looking people roaring up the driveway and parking their golf-club-esque cars haphazardly, overlapping the parking spaces.

'even after the berkowitz thing?'

' _especially_ after the berkowitz thing.' she hums, somewhere between contented and agitated. 'it was just a kind of risky thing for me to do. I could've completely humiliated myself - well, actually, I still could, couldn't I? the day is young...' 

scott looks at her profile, the sun shining behind it. she brings the bouquet to her nose and the slow wind picks up wisps of her hair and tangles them within the petals. 'come on, as if someone would reject you.'

'oh, they have. it just requires a certain level of confidence, you know? something I usually don't have in spades. but for whatever reason, I did earlier,' she says, voice strained, apologetic. she stretches her fingers, splaying them over her knees to the point that it looked painful. her knuckles blanched and her veins, tendons, bones, rose to the surface.

'my lack thereof probably gave you an upper hand.'

lea laughs, and tilts her head back to look at him. 'you think?'

'trust me, I _know_.'

-

after a few hours, and multiple migrations from bench to bench, to waterfront, and then to wandering the streets after the boat club owners shooed them from the park, she says she has to meet her roommates for dinner, and leaves him at the bus stop he'd started at. he doesn't kiss her, or hold her hand, or even hug her, but he smiles at her and waves, grinning bigger when she turns around on the other end of the street and raises the flowers triumphantly. he still thinks it's dumb, nothing'll ever convince him it wasn't a pathetic thing to do, but as long as she likes them... well, that was good enough. and nobody would ever have to know.

the bus ride home is the same as it was there, only this time the colours outside were a little more mute and dim as more rain threatened. he clunks his head against the glass, ignoring his reflection, but imagining what his face must look like from the pressure of his muscles pulled into a smile that's beginning to grow painful. he considers when it's appropriate to call her - when he gets home, to make sure _she_ got home okay? tomorrow? leave it a week? he decides to just ask brian, as he's managed to hold missi down for a few months now, and he can't be disagreeable about _everything_ , surely. 

-

he gets to the flat and manages to sequester himself to his room, everybody too busy either yelling, being yelled at, or zoning out of the situation to notice him come in. for once, he can shut his bedroom door and just breathe, back pressed against the wooden door that was covered in tacky posters from corner to corner, looking at the dented ceiling in a daze. 

scott puts the phone number in between the pages of a detrimentally empty notebook, sparsely populated with chord progressions and ideas for instrumentals, but not with the words he used to cram and cram and cram into anything he could get his hands on. he thinks, again, for once, that he could fill a page with no trouble, and so he does.

it's nothing straightforward, or expository, or political, or sexual, or as if it should be read over the top of a snuff film (the criteria one felt they needed to hit if they were to have brian even _consider_ co-authorship) but it makes sense, if only to him. maybe one day it won't even meet that end, but for now it does - and for now, scott feels the most accomplished he has in three years, which is somewhat paradoxical to him, but nothing over the past three years have been straightforward, or even remotely as if they were happening in the same dimension that he grew up in, went to school in, or met brian in. maybe he'll turn that into poetry someday, too, but it's hard to see the world you're living in for what it is, when you're still so enraptured with it. 


	3. nature is a language

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> first times, and all that. friends. marco polo-driven mayhem in a 7/11. 'cherry popping.' familial exposition, and... sharing clothes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate writing smut but I felt the compulsion to? anyway. enjoy.

there's no space on the planet more liminal than a 7/11 at one in the morning, lea thinks, pressed to the side of the counter that held the hotdog stand and slushie machine, churning synthetic blue and red fluids around and around to a mechanical hum. 

'marco!' brad slurs, yelling from the front of the store from where the racks of bubblegums and menthol cigarettes coexist. 

especially when you're drunk. 

she sees scott's back poking out from behind one of the shelves, and has a clear view of where brian and missi crouch from behind another. she catches brian's eye, poking out through lengths of black hair that looks more washed than usual, maybe for missi, maybe not. his mouth curves into an impish smile.

'polo!'

low to the ground, lea runs to join brian as missi runs behind the coolers. scott manifests beside them.

'you jackass, he'll find all of us,' brian laughs.

lea, still pitifully reticent around scott and hating herself for it, hopes her brief glance towards him says enough. 

'I feel like I'm third wheeling,' brian hisses, turning to missi to mime shooting himself in the head. 

'marco!'

'stop crinkling the fritos, lea.'

'sorry.'

'polo!'

brad bumps into the bathroom door and grows ever closer - lea pads to the front of the store, watching scott and brian bicker as they follow her half-way. brad swings his arms around blindly, narrowly missing missi's nose. she makes eye contact with lea and clamps both hands over her mouth as she grows red with hysterics. 

'come on, you guys, this place is the size of my fucking bathroom, how am I losing this? I'm sick of this.'

the store clerk rolls his eyes, straightening the bars of hersheys in the stand on the counter. 

scott and brian sound as if they're strategising something, and lea, like the dumb teenage girl she feels she is, and has felt for the past few weeks as she navigates a relationship that is distinctly hard to put a box around, sneaks glances at scott, getting more and more frustrated with herself. _it's fine, just take it slow -_ but she wonders how slow is too slow before she can't keep up with the kinds of interesting, libidinal people he surrounds himself with. she feels like the ugly duckling, the bright red thumb jammed in the door. 

' - and _frankly_ , I'd rather be on a team with your girlfriend, because at least she looks like she could outrun somebody - '

'she's not - '

brian crawls over to lea. 'scott tells me you go running in the morning,' he explains, using his hands to talk and nearly losing his balance. 

'oh, does he?' she hisses back, throat sore with the strain of keeping her voice low in the near-silent store. 

'yes, he feels intimidated - maybe a little turned on - that you're athletic and - '

before lea can reply, though she doubts her dumb, slack-jawed expression is anywhere near righting itself again, missi shrieks from the back of the store as brad laughs triumphantly, right before he takes a step forward and careens into a shelf, sending packets of oreos of all sorts of questionable and superfluous flavours to the grimy floor. 

'you can open your eyes now, moron,' scott jibes, picking up a tray of the cookies and concealing it in his jacket, all the while looking at lea. 

the chubby, pimply (even more so than the five of them had been at his age) cashier hauls himself out from behind his stingy, cramped counter and presents himself at the head of the aisle, the five of them looking up at him guiltily from their ridiculous positions. it takes everything they've got to restrain the incredulous giggles. 

'would you all _please_ \- just get the fuck out of my store.'

-

scott passes the pack of oreos around, which have pop rocks in them and are almost definitely left over from the fourth of july. they walk the empty, unlit streets of miami, expertly avoiding the hordes of tampa bay rays and marlins fans coming home from the last innings, mostly at brian's behest, though he won't explain the vendetta. brian chides brad for coming onto missi, which in turn she chides brian for his 'unearned possessiveness', leaving lea and scott to walk in a somewhat austere silence, their knuckles bumping together in a way that reminds lea of all those schmaltzy movies she and her roommates watched together on saturday afternoons; and she just wants to _scream_ until her throat rips open and produces something of worth. 

'oreo?'

'I'll pass,' she says quickly, jumping at the conversation. 'judging by the retching sound brian made.' 

she looks around scott - and he's just radiating warmth, and he smells amazing, and she wishes she could be anybody else right now, somebody cool and viable - to see missi coddling a moping brian who's dragging his feet along the floor defiantly. 

'is he always like this?'

scott follows her gaze, biting the top off of an oreo and chewing it languidly. 'only for missi. he's actually kind of insecure, believe it or not, and she's really good about it, so. yeah. I think they're nice together.'

'yeah,' lea decides, looking up at him again as he starts scraping the cream off with his front teeth. usually she'd find that gross, or some emotion akin to it, but for some reason she doesn't feel anything, and maybe even appreciates how he looks from a different angle. 'I think so, too.'

-

brad splits off, saying he's going to _his_ girlfriend's place, until brian says something about _horse_ , and lea thinks she understands what's actually going on, an assumption bolstered by how on edge everyone seems after brad splits from the group and wanders off down a bike path, whistling.

they finally hit the main streets, baseball fans, drunker and lewder than they had all been before they'd walked off the alcohol, peppering the sidewalks as they try to get into bars and clubs, while others are tossed out. everyone groans collectively, braving the promenade.

'faggots!'

'you wish,' brian returns.

a beer bottle is lobbed in their direction, shattering on a store's portico, the glass precipitation succumbing to gravity just as they pass it.

'backwoods idiot...'

'what assholes,' lea supplies, worrying that she sounds as if she doesn't understand the gravity of the situation.

'you get used to it,' missi assures her. 'besides, I think men like that secretly love it when girls are fags - '

'yes, missi, I'm sure they'd love it if you two started necking in the middle of little havana,' brian grumbles, getting his keys out of his pockets with only a few blocks before their apartments. 

'and you wouldn't?' 

'who said I wouldn't?' 

-

they reach the apartment, and lea expects to be excluded from the rest of the excitement. that is, until, brian tosses scott the keys, and puts his arm around missi.

'well, I'd love to stay and chat, but I think it's time for scott to pop his cherry, so I'm gonna crash at missi's.'

'wha - ' scott tries to protest, but the couple merely smile, wave, and walk off in the other direction, sniggering to themselves about something, leaving scott and lea in a distinctly more awkward position, scott running his thumb across the ridges of the key.

they hover in the middle of the street, crickets rubbing their legs together from anonymous places and giving lea something to focus on. 

'so...' 

'would you like to come up?' scott blurts out, nearly puncturing his bottom lip with his canine. 'I mean, you don't have to. just because he sort of has a tendency to force people to do stuff doesn't mean he cares what you actually do - ' 

'scott,' she soothes, finally plucking up the courage to touch him (at which he goes cataleptic). 'I'd love to.'

and so she does.

-

they sit shoulder to shoulder on the couch, lea debating how fast this was supposed to be going. she should've drunk more beforehand, she scolds herself, and maybe she wouldn't be being so frigid and awkward about the whole thing. then again, scott is much the same; although having two like personalities is always hit or miss. 

'I know brian sort of... alluded to the fact that I'm a virgin, but I'm not.'

she bursts out laughing, feeling bad when she sees the shock on his face. she takes his being off guard as an opportunity to straddle him on the couch, fingers brushing the underside of his collar. 

'I doubted it, but I don't see why it'd matter.'

'oh, no. me neither.'

she pushes a few buttons back through their holes, leaving part of his chest exposed. 

'is this alright?'

she trails her nails down the skin, and he shivers underneath them.

'absolutely,' he says, and it sounds as if he's choking on the implication. 

-

a few minutes later, they're still pawing above the clothes, but this time on scott's single bed. lea looks around the room in the lulls between stolen kisses and gentle moans into each other's mouths and skin still cold and damp from the rain outside. a few members of the talking heads, immortalised in a tacky, shiny poster just above the orange-y wood of the bed frame, stare down at her as she cocks her head back in ecstasy, scott's teeth gripping her neck. 

'harder.'

'sorry?'

'bite me. harder.'

still reluctant, almost irritatingly so, his teeth graze the twitching tendons of her throat, clamping down eventually and producing a dull throb where he bumps against the divots between her flesh and bones. she holds his shoulders, his clavicle extending to poke out of his thin skin and jutting into the creases of her palms, wondering what they'd look like on a low-res piece of film, or a hastily snapped polaroid, or an in-the-moment painting. she feels like art. he, beneath her legs and her hands and her lips, feels like art. she wants to feel like this forever; purposeful and contrived, wanted and intentional.

he pulls away and she feels like bruised fruit. his mouth stutters and quivers and shakes. his lidded eyes stay stuck, fixated, on her near-bare torso before he finds it in himself to look up at her, smiling lackadaisically. 

'I want you.'

'steal me.'

-

clothes are whipped at the built-in closet on the other side of the room, lea's underwear conveniently caught on the silvery handles along with scott's jeans, slung on by a belt loop. she looks at it, almost admiring it as if it were done with a united objective, something they'd created together. she can't believe she's waited so long, but the strength of the dull, aching ardor in every inch of her body makes the hesitation worth it. 

they kneel before each other on the mattress, the overhead lights dim and flickering from overuse and lack of maintenance. she can just about see him, and she thinks that the navy hue covering his body from the shadow is the most invigorating thing she's ever experienced. 

'would you like me to lie down?'

scott scratches his jaw, grimacing hesitantly. 'I was wondering - never mind, it's... yeah, okay.'

'what is it?' she presses her fingertips to his cheeks, revelling the convulsion he gives. she brings her mouth to his again, leaving her lips hooked on his until something makes her pull away, the sudden dryness making them stick together.

nose to nose, his eyes clamped shut and scrunching tighter with each word, he says: 'I was wondering if I could, you know, be the one to lie down.'

lea runs her palms up his thighs, landing on his waist to slide him down onto his back. his body stretches and buckles as soon as he hits the duvet, pushing the heels of his hands to his temple. he gives a languid smile, holding his arms out to beckon her down to him. 

'do you need me to put anything on?'

'it's fine, I'm on the pill.'

lea, cripplingly aware of how her body moves and rolls and feels, positions herself between his legs. she gives him a few tugs, putting herself in a steady rhythm. he lets out a staccato of gasps, barely keeping his eyes open to watch her face wandering his for approval as she slides down and wraps her mouth around it, licking the underside.

after a few minutes filled with vulgar moans and his legs jerking either side of her head as the feelings swell and overload, he gains a sort of lucidity and drops his head forward, waves of brown hair sliding past his shoulders. she pulls away and he gives himself a few more pulls as he catches his breath, the pair of them laughing nervously.

'sorry, I'm not that experienced.'

'don't worry about it,' she tells him. 'I don't think anybody's as experienced as they'd like to be.'

'is philosophising part of the foreplay?' he smiles.

'oh, for sure. surprisingly, it's a turn-off for a lot of people.' 

scott looks at her for a moment, looking her up and down as he thinks. she pushes herself back against her palms, spreading her legs a little further; he gets the idea, returning the favour with her hands buried in his hair, tugging it with each nuanced sensation. she feels like she's hallucinating whenever she hears the sound of his voice, or if his tongue hits a new spot, and, suddenly, it's like she can't see anything but a searing white pleasure.

-

things take their course and about an hour later lea's rolled onto her back, careful not to get the come on her chest onto the sheets as scott knocks around in the bathroom to find towels. she takes in more of his room, this time with the lights on and feeling less tiredness clouding her vision than she'd had before. there's posters for the police, attack of the 50ft woman, bowie, some bands she recognised as being the sort she never found it in herself to enjoy, as well as postcards and photos it looked as if he'd taken himself. she reaches up and raps her knuckles against the freezing wall, coming to rest on a picture of scott with what looks like his parents, and maybe his sister, though there's no familial resemblance to speak of.

'here,' a voice says, a towel dropped gently into her hand. she says her thanks and scoops the fluid up into the soft, green fabric, fumbling about where to put it before scott unburdens her from it and slingshots it into the clothes basket in the corner of the room. 'do you need anything else?'

'other than just lying down with you? nothing.'

it takes him a while to register what she's said, trying to hide the flush coming across his cheeks as he dresses himself and sits with her on the bed. he rests his head on her shoulder, mouth pressed into the fabric of her t-shirt. 

'is this mine?' he asks after a while.

she starts scratching his scalp, sensing how tired he was based on how heavily his body slumps against her own. 

'oh, yeah. you don't mind, do you - '

'not at all. I think it's nice. you can keep it, if you want.'

lea hasn't properly regarded which shirt she'd picked up from the floor - she pulls down on the hem so she can see it, and is met with the effigy of betty boop staring back at her, and figures she could've picked a worse shirt up from the pile.

she smiles despite herself. 'I'd like that.'

scott shuffles closer to her, head bumping against the places on her neck she could feel bruises forming. she looks back at the photo on the wall.

'is that your family?'

he shifts. 'mm. yeah. mom. dad. sister. how about you?'

'mom, dad, divorced.'

'sorry.'

'you get used to it. two birthdays and that whole cliché, y'know?' she kisses the top of his head. 'but, I guess birthdays kind of suck, so it's like a double-sucky day, and they're both trying to figure out who gave you what and you can see them totalling the amount they each spent on you and it just feels like you're some perfunctory davidthat big old goliathis trying to propitiate from the _other_ goliath.' 

a few beats pass and lea wants to rip out her tongue.

'that was an overshare, wasn't it?'

'not at all. shouldn't we get to know each other?'

she pets his hair, solely because she likes how he squirms sort of appreciatively at the gesture. 'what would you like me to know?'

'well, if we're on the topic of family, I'm adopted.'

lea squeezes her eyes shut. 'I feel like I maybe _shouldn't_ have complained about a divorce?' 

'don't worry. it wasn't miserable. still isn't. I wasn't one of those cases where I sat in some miserable foster home until someone could be bothered to come along.'

'that's good. did you... did you always know?'

'I sensed something was wrong, but no. I just assumed I looked different. my sister let the cat out of the bag when I was, like, twelve.'

'maliciously?'

he gives a dry laugh, and lea realises she can feel his words vibrating through her skin.

'she'll never tell.'

more silence. scott turns out the lamp on the bedside table. 

'did I do alright?' he mumbles, mouth once again concealed in the crook of her neck, purposefully muffling himself. 

'you did more than that. and me?'

'incredible.' 

she can hear the smile in his voice, and to a lesser extent the exhaustion, at which point she accepts that she can't keep her eyes open much longer, especially in the face of a wearingly dark, empty space that has so much less to offer than the felicity she'd accustomed herself to earlier. she says nothing, more so for the fact that in this moment she can only _feel_ what she's feeling, radiating and clenching all across her abdomen, rather than pin down the words at her disposal to articulate it adequately. lea hopes, somehow, maybe fancifully, that he can garner any of this from the osmosis of skin-to-skin contact, but resigns herself to never finding out either way.


	4. shiver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mirrored images - lives lived congruously

'I think it's safe to say I've really fucked this up.' 

scott watches brian, crosslegged on the other cushion of the ratty couch, align his hash in the tobacco paper. his friend shrugs, licking the roll closed. 

'shit happens in relationships. I'm sure she'll be fine. can I have a light?' 

scott tries to tame his sighing, fishing around in his pocket for the orange lighter, the last dregs of lighter fluid lapping at the bottom. brian lights up, inhaling and breathing out, all the while still not looking at scott, who - despite the lack of attention - wants to press further. 

he digs the tip of his thumbnail into his forehead, pushing the flesh up and down until the sharpness begins to sting. 'agh, I dunno man.' scott puts his head in his hands, groaning into his palms. 'I finally had something good, right? what if this is it. one stupid argument and I've tanked it completely.'

'if you keep complaining, I'm going to punch you in the face - '

'- I don't care,' scott counters, putting a finger up. brian rolls his eyes and passes him the joint.

'smoke it. it'll chill you out, at least. until you gain some persepctive.' 

'what perspective?' scott asks, choking on the skunk-y smoke. 'enlighten me. cigarettes chill me out more than weed, by the way.'

brian looks at him balefully. 'far be it from me to suggest something practical.'

'mm-hm,' scott hums around the end of the joint, passing it back. 

-

'I think I'm just being... dramatic about this.'

'what did he say again?' leigh asks, trying (and failing) his hand at new foam art on the coffee he'd been commanded to fix for lea when the girl on shift before, who'd been dealing with the fall-out earlier, had to leave.

lea groans, putting her head on the table. her words come out muffled, yet the agitation is all there. 'basically, I asked him - as a _joke -_ if he'd tell me if he, I don't know, had some skanky threesome on tour and started snorting coke off of prostitutes - ' she pulls herself up, waving at the air as if discrediting herself. 'because, you know, they've just been signed and they're going on tour with a bunch of other bands, and I thought I'd be all queer about it and tease him.'

'and?' leigh prompts, sitting down at the table, double-checking he'd put the _open_ sign to _closed_. 

'and...' she drags out, throwing her hands in the air. 'he couldn't give me an answer. but it's not just that: he _couldn't look me in the eye_. and then he just gets up and leaves.'

'is that all?'

'well, no. of course I go nuts later on and I ask him why he was weird about it, and then he gets defensive and told me that I shouldn't just _assume_ that that's what he'd be doing, and I guess I offended him by implying that he'd do all that cliché, defamatory shit on the first time round. or at all.'

'I mean, if you were just _joking_ ,' leigh hazards, trying to understand the gravity of the situation.

'yeah, I guess. but he didn't see it that way, and I get why he got upset about it, but I just felt like... when he didn't answer it said a lot. like, maybe he'd wanted to do that, deep down, because it's just what you always hear about _rockstars_ doing, and I'd busted him before he could even do it behind my back.'

lea finishes her outburst with a shrug, mellowing out and sipping shyly at the coffee. 

'leigh, as a guy, tell me if I'm being stupid.' 

leigh exhales, drumming his fingers on the table. 'well, I'm a guy, but I'm not a guy in a band. that's a different species entirely.'

'oh - don't say that!' lea whines, making leigh laugh. 

'but, you know, scott doesn't seem like the sort of guy to do all of that. brian, yes, from what I know about him - ' (he relaxes internally, having made lea smile, even a little). 'I'm sure he was just hurt that you thought he _is_ the sort to whore himself out, as soon as he gets a lick of fame.'

'you can see why I asked though, right? I'm allowed to be worried about this stuff. I like him, a lot, and... I don't know. he could fuck like twenty, thirty, one-hundred people, and I may never know. he could make an entire fucking family in arizona, and I may never know.'

'yeah, well,' leigh starts, finally feeling as if he's landed on some semblance of wisdom. 'you'll just have to trust him, you know?'

-

brian hangs off the couch, tapping a beat onto his stomach and mouthing something to himself. scott sits on the couch, idle, and still overworking his brain. 

'so you're not going to snort coke off of strippers?' brian deadpans, almost ironically. 'well, you're not going to _now_ , at any rate.'

'I was never going to!' he snaps.

'alright, alright.' he watches brian bite his cheek. 'just, like, call her. it's not that hard to say sorry.'

'but what if saying sorry makes it worse?'

'how... how does that compute, in your mind?'

scott ignores him in preference of getting up to pace around the room, eyes flicking to the phone on the wall every once in a while. the urge, really, was to hang himself with the cord rather than enter into any sort of conflict, but... maybe, just maybe, brian could be right about this _one_ thing. 

'do you always apologise to missi?' scott ventures, biding his time as he traces his fingers along the numbers on the keypad. 

'yep.' 

'do you really?'

'no, but I'm willing to say anything to get you to grow a pair and stop wallowing. we have things to do.'

-

leigh and lea sit on top of the large, yellow bins in the alley behind the store, lea giving leigh his first cigarette that isn't a menthol, and they've upgraded from plain-old venetian blend coffee to the (self-confessedly) pretentious, premixed cans of gin and tonic. 

'this is horrific,' he tells her. 'it's vile. I can really taste the arsenic, you know. the polonium.'

'don't be a dick, leigh, it's just what _real_ people smoke. like, actual, functioning adults, who've outgrown their preteen personas.'

'like, nic addicts?'

'be quiet,' she grins, enjoying the ensuing silence. the phone rings from within the building, and they both look at each other, wordlessly agreeing to ignore it.

-

'oh my _fuck_. no-one's picking up. maybe there's an embargo on the phones, in case it's me.' scott's leg jitters beneath him, a sheen of sweat collecting on his forehead, propagated by an involuntary shivering he has to press himself against the wall to satiate. 

'maybe everyone's on break. are you sure she's even at work?' brian says, voice verging on rage. 'you know, I can't remember the last time I did a pushup. should I try and do a pushup?'

'whatever, man,' scott breathes, pressing lea's home number in, of course, to no avail.

-

leigh walks lea home, entertaining each of her plausible theories as to why scott wouldn't give her a straight answer, and conversely, whether she should forgive him or not. he smiles and nods, more interested with how each café or bar on the strip are advertising themselves these days, as sequella's starting to bomb out, just a little bit. part of him blames people like scott and brian, bringing their fort lauderdale sensibility to the ritzy-ditzy retirement village of boca, making places like his less _cool_. lea seems happy, though, so maybe having people like scott around isn't strictly negative.

'I mean, of course I'll forgive him, but how much should I milk this? oh, ignore me, you are, anyway. I can't hold a grudge for shit.'

'it's important to have a bit of tension. makes for good sex,' leigh snorts.

'gross, you're like my dad. that's like my _dad_ telling me what he likes to do in bed. how would you like your _dad_ \- ' lea hitches herself onto the tips of her toes, nearly falling as she gets in his face - 'telling you what gets him off.'

'point made.'

they walk along the sidewalk, hands in pockets. lea realises that they're nearing the dip in the road that leads to brian's apartment - she knows that scott has practice today, and wonders whether was having one of those guy talks that she always heard her friends in high school having whenever their girlfriends acted crazy. her heart drops a little bit, speeding up as they pass the corner, heading onwards to her own apartment block. 

'thanks for listening to me.'

'like you said, I feel like your dad, so.'

'so?'

'so, I'm here to listen.'

'gross,' lea drawls, elbowing him. 'but, yeah. you're old and kind of weird, but you've got some sense in you. a sense I don't have.'

'what, the sense of someone that's had three divorces?'

'god, three?' lea's mouth hangs open unattractively. 'well, I guess so...'

-

'try her landline,' freddy tells him, taking over the counselling position from brian, who's smacking his head against the wall, having muttered incoherently about how ballistic scott was making him (' _making_ you?' was almost freddy's answer, but he thought better of it).

scott grits his teeth. 'fine.'

'why just 'fine'?'

'because I think this might be the one she picks up, and I don't know if I want this confrontation.' 

'do you like her?' 

'of course.'

'would you kill yourself if she left you?'

'what?'

'that's a yes,' brian supplies.

'then amend it. she asked a stupid question, you gave a stupid answer, you both need to talk about it,' freddy dictates, walking over to brian to talk composition before scott could protest further.

-

as soon as lea walks through the door, the phone rings. she throws down her bag with a slight edge, knowing exactly what it was, but, still, isn't totally unreceptive to the idea of duking it out. 

she lets the phone ring a few more times, seeing how long he could hold out before giving up entirely, but he doesn't. she takes the garishly-red phone off the receiver and waits for the line to connect, decidedly against the idea of being the one to speak first.

'lea?'

'yeah.'

'you busy, or anything?'

'I'm only busy if you're insisting on doing this over the phone.'

and so, after much bargaining, and a muffled fight on his end of the line that makes her feel just a little bad for giving him more problems, they find themselves at red reef, both of them kicking at the dirt beneath their feet where the grass had been mowed too closely, immature in their simultaneous resistance to making the first move, or acknowledging each other at all.

-

'thick or thin, right,' scott comments, still weary of her and shy in his tonality, despite the argument (and ensuing make-up fellatio in the public restroom of the park) having been resolved hours ago. 

'is thick the bad one, or thin?' she responds, stroking circles into the crook of his thumb, trying to effect indifference. 

'I always thought thin was the bad one. like, the love - affection - is thin. withering. diluted.'

'oh. I always took it to mean thick like gristle. hard to chew and sort of frustrating.'

scott chuckles. 'agree to disagree.'

'truce. I don't have it in me to be mad at you again.'

'even so,' he starts, returning the soft physical sentiment of fiddling with each other's hands absent-mindedly (he thinks that there's something about that kind of perpetual-yet-small gesturing that makes him feel the warmest) 'you're always entitled to it, if I'm being a dick.'

'I know. you are, too. I think insinuating that you're a coke whore - '

' - and a regular whore,' he adds.

'yes, yes, that too - was a little unfair of me. I was only joking, though.'

'I couldn't tell,' he counters, for what must be the millionth time, but stops himself short of the previous belligerence that's followed it.

they walk under the street lights peppering the mostly-empty sidewalks, discovering that midnight on a wednesday is the perfect time for an impromptu excursion, post-argument or otherwise, for the sheer isolation of the usually heaving and sweaty streets. 

'I'm glad our first fight was over something stupid, actually,' she says after a while. 

'mm. starting as we mean to go on.'

'I'd like to think so.'

'you can always come to the venues and hotels or whatever, to keep me in check,' he offers. 

'I'll just show up backstage and pose as, like, cherry lemon from wichita or something ridiculous like that and test you that way.'

'oh, that sounds _plenty_ healthy,' he chides, nudging her with his elbow and letting her stumble across the sidewalk at arms length, still tethered by tangled fingers. 

'I thought so. I'm proud of it,' he sees her grin under the warm light of a red lamp, face lit up and shadowed in weird patterns. 'I'm kidding, in case this starts another fight.' 

'wouldn't it make you feel better, though? knowing that the stripper I choose to get my rocks off with looks like you? because, after all, it's not _actually_ cheating,' scott hums, knowing that he's taunting an active volcano into erupting. she doesn't seem all that bothered, though, still smiling even as she looks away at the odd car passing through the high street too quickly. 

'should've been a lawyer, putesky. eternal bullshitter.'

'you'd get on with my parents _so_ well,' he tells her, hoping to sound offhanded, but also, ever so delicately, testing the waters of taking things to the next stage - familial navigations.

she looks up at him, nodding, dangly earrings catching the neon lights every so often. 'I'd like to test that.' 

'you sure?'

she shrugs, pulling her face into an unreadable expression. 'we'll have to see.' 


	5. 'cause you won't (fade out)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> goths with carcinogens at pool parties. what could go wrong?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oil of angels - cocteau twins

'they're trying to kill me.'

'brian, no-one's trying to kill you,' lea pleads, trying to offer him a solo cup full of ice water, as scott and freddy and jess loiter behind her, watching. 'you're drugged to your eyeballs.'

'it's just like at disney world. the ss found me. missi, where's missi? did they get her?' 

'christ above... missi's in the bathroom. the only thing that's got her is alcohol poisoning.'

'like a nerve agent?' 

'my god. can someone get jeordie?' jess interjects, handing her joint over to freddy before heading further into the house - whoever's it is, lea still doesn't know. 

lea leaves brian with the cup of water and heads out to the porch where the music was playing from the stereo - someone had finagled a simple minds song onto the tape deck - and the pool lay still and uninhabited, leaves and grass floating grossly on top of the soft ripples. she hangs close to the door, listening to the ensuing conversation between brian and freddy, of which the latter was desperately trying to garner what it feels like to be _that_ high without having to damage himself in anyway. 

something pokes her side, and then threads itself around her midriff. 'you're brave to deal with him when he's like that,' scott tells her, fishing around in the pockets of his jeans and retrieving a slip of paper on the tips of his fingers.

'oh, well. I've known addicts on worse stuff than low-grade lsd, it's hardly new territory,' she says, letting him put his finger in her mouth, placing the acid on her tongue. he takes his tab, too, kissing her as it's still dissolving in the warmth of his mouth. 

flustered, lea scratches the back of her neck, hands clawing their way to either of the (loosely speaking) buns on either side of her head, occupying her hands, as he pulls away. he grins at her, pupils dilating, tilting the neck of his beer towards her.

lea listens to the shouting and jeering inside: from what she can garner, it's jeordie ribbing brian for being such a lightweight, and brian arguing back incoherently, as if verging on a stroke.

'I kind of like that we're the calmest here,' she comments, swigging the beer, which tastes too hoppy and floral. 'there's something unappealing about _such_ unrestrained mayhem.'

the sliding doors creak behind them and stephen steps out across the deck, stripping his clothes off and dropping himself into the pool.

'for god's sake, pogo,' jess chides. 'wasting a fucking joint.'

'I mean, I'm more worried about whatever diseases are in that pool,' jeordie adds, staggering out to join the growing congregation on the deck. lea relinquishes the feeling of feeling safe and alone as the song changes and some speed-metal monstrosity permeates the airwaves. 'we could've at least strained it before killing off our keyboardist.'

'ah, well,' scott mutters as they watch more and more of their friends undress and throw themselves into the water. 'chaos rubs off. are you feeling it, yet?'

'the acid, or the chaos?' lea asks, peeling off her vest, then grabbing the hem of scott's shirt, shucking off his clothes for him. 

he stumbles and laughs, unbuckling his belt. 'I think I have my answer.'

-

lea, sat atop scott's shoulders in the water, struggles to stay upright as jeordie, sat on jess, wrestles her off. she's growing woozy with the burst of acid starting to crawl through her, scott also starting to sway in the water, which is beginning to look pinker and more mobile than blue and calm.

'this is totally unfair,' lea whines, finally feeling a little more looser and more open to bantering with scott's group.

'how so?' jeordie teases, wrenching one of her arms to the side and almost successfully debasing her.

'uh, you're a guy.'

'hardly,' freddy comments, floating past the quartet on his back. he bumps up against brian's legs, which are dangling in the water as brian sits on the edge of the pool despondently, still fully clothed in the blazing sun.

jeordie lets go of lea's hands and scoops up a splash of water to douse freddy with, spraying brian in the process and earning a vehemently-outstretched middle finger in return. 

'crank...' jess mutters.

scott takes the distraction to swim away, sequestering the pair of them to one corner of the pool. lea slips off his slick back with ease, everything moving too slowly and everything she touches feeling too tactile, especially scott's skin as she clings onto his shoulders, each of his pores and small, freckled, moles too apparent to the tips of her fingers. 

'I'm _way_ high, babe,' she breathes, eyes scouring the water, waiting for something to jump out at her.

'you think I don't know?' he laughs, words slurring around each other like a melting pot of vowels and syllables, but whether that's just how lea's hearing it, she doesn't know.

'hey!' jeordie shouts from the other end of the pool, still on jess' shoulders. 'I won. that counts as a forfeit.' 

'keep telling yourself that,' lea returns, slipping down under the water and returning to the surface to recline on her back, watching the clear sky bordered by luscious tree tops that look black against the sunlight. 

-

lea sits on the warm wood of the deck, water dropping off of her and onto the planks, creating a disappearing circle of chlorinated water around her. she licks at the ice cream, watching the guys fuck with each other in the pool through scott's sunglasses. jess sits beside her, painting her nails, missi and brian having secluded themselves in the house for the past hour or so.

'I think they're trying to drown your boyfriend,' jess tells her absently after a while, dragging the brush of red over a toenail.

'hm?' lea starts, snapping her attention back to the scene in the pool, jeordie and stephen holding scott under as freddy lamely pulls them off of him. she groans. 'hey, assholes. maybe don't kill him in front of me?'

'who do you offer as a sacrifice?' jeordie asks, hand still firmly on the back of scott's head as he thrashes beneath the surface. 

'literally anybody,' lea says, bored, biting the scoop of vanilla. 'are you born this stupid or do you have to work at it?' 

they let him go, the entertainment value lost in not being able to hold his life in the balance sated as scott lashes out at them, high and confused and breathless.

'what the _fuck_ is wrong with you two?' he snaps, paddling to the edge of the pool to pull himself back onto the concrete, shaking his limbs dry. 

'just having fun, scottie,' jeordie says, repeating his assault of flicking water up at him as scott walks away, taking the towel extended to him by lea.

he sits beside her on the decking, accepting the joint jess had taken a few drags of already. 

'everything's very colourful,' lea tells him, chin resting on her knees.

'you're weird when you're high, you know that?' he tells her between drags of the joint. he hands her the roll, which she plucks from his fingers and sucks on lackadaisically. 'it's like you haven't taken anything at all.'

lea shrugs, passing the weed back. 'maybe I don't feel the need to let everyone know about it.' she gestures towards the trio in the pool, now trying to drown each other, or play a more violent game of water polo, whether they knew they were emulating that or not. 'like them, for instance, and one of them isn't even stoned.'

'right,' scott confirms. then, offhandedly, he tells her: 'there're gnomes at the end of the garden.'

she tilts the glasses down her nose. 'there isn't.'

'oh. well, to me, there is. I can see them, all lined up. behind freddy, see?'

'I don't see.' she takes the joint back. 'at least we know your acid works,' she drones with an exhale of smoke.

scott squints. there're still gnomes, surely, multicoloured and creepy and ceramic, but they're glitching like a reel of tape that's had a knife taken it, then stuck back in the player for all to see. 'huh.'

'I'm gonna get another drink,' she tells him, getting up. 'care to brave the cavern with me?'

he takes her hand, heaving himself up, suddenly very aware of his semi-nudity and how soaking wet he is, reeking of chlorine. 

'so, there's nothing at the end of the garden?' he asks once they're in the kitchen, lea struggling with a bottle opener, which was overcomplicated enough when sober, and the two bottles of sam adams. 

'why won't this stay still...' she mutters, though scott doesn't see the bottles moving at all, just lea misjudging her depth perception each time, ramming the curve of the bottle opener into the counter instead of the metal caps. 'and, no. there's nothing but those poor flowers stuck between those stones. whose idea was that?'

'no idea,' scott mutters, taking the bottle that she's finally managed to wrench open. 

'hey! chivalry _is_ dead...' she moans, grasping at the air where the bottle once was. 'could've let me have the first one.'

'oh come on. I'm not out of it enough to believe that you care about _that_ ,' he says.

'maybe I'm just a bad actor.'

'trust me,' scott starts, listening to the grunting coming from the downstairs bathroom, just the next room over, the only people unaccounted for being brian and missi, and then looking out to the people still in the pool. 'there are worse ones than you.'

-

freddy, the only one still relatively sober (at least not high enough to be as incoherent as the rest of them, all of them beached out on couches, lazily petting their respective partners and complaining about their growing headaches and nausea) stands by the phone, stuck on hold by the pizza place on spanish river boulevard, already forgetting everyone's orders - not that anybody's lucid enough to care about his misspoken requests. 

'lea, lea,' jess starts, body half hung off the couch as jeordie spoons her from behind. she waves at lea with her hand in a jerking, twitching movement. though they're three seats away from each other, lea feels as if her fingers are going to slap her face at any moment. 'where're you, like, from?' 

'the u.s. of a,' lea tells her, turning over on the couch - an action which only serves to make her head spin more crushingly, and throb more dully, nestling her face into the darkness created by scott's form. 

'but, _where_.'

'mass,' she just about manages. '-achusetts.'

'mass _hole_ ,' someone chuckles, silenced promptly by what sounds like, to lea, at least, a pillow hitting them deftly in the face. 

'takes one to know one,' lea says, scott starting to rub her back tenderly. she hears the phone being slung back onto the receiver harshly, and freddy giving them some obsolete 'estimated time of arrival' - and she's still wondering whose house she's in. 

-

the group pick around the pizza, alcohol and drugs of all grades filling them with enough nausea and low-level paranoia that the hunger they all feel is swiftly negated and forgotten about. fred complains about wasting his time and money, but nobody particularly listens to him; he, _finally_ , does a speed ball and ascends to the rest of their levels and shuts up (as horrible as this train of thought feels to them in hindsight).

'did the ss let you go, bri? jeordie asks from beside jess, sticking a hand in the curls of his hair. lea watches the interaction with abject curiosity, still trying to suss these people out. they were nice enough to her, but unbridled in their abhorrence to others. it was a dichotomy she didn't know if she could handle while sober, let alone this stoned. 

'I think so,' brian says, missi asleep on his shoulder. 'they're not here anymore, anyway.'

'that's good,' jess adds. 'let's leave them in orlando.'

lea pats scott's back, getting his attention. she speaks into the soft bit of flesh in between his breast bone and shoulder, though none of him is particularly soft in and of itself, more like bone and muscles that show out of necessity rather than intention. 'what happens in orlando?' she whispers.

pressing his lips to the crown of her head, subtly laying a hand on her ass, he tells her that he doesn't know, and knows even less if he wishes that he did. she accepts this, dozing off again in the warmth and darkness she's created for herself.

-

their little congregation digresses from a party into a, in very liberal terms, get-together, people grouping off to do whatever they wish. scott and lea mainly stick together, with freddy and stephen discussing numerology as an offshoot from whatever scientific programme was muted on the tv, and jess and jeordie spurring missi and brian into pornographic prank calls in the dining room, the space dissolving into laughter. eventually scott suggests they go into the pool again, now that it's dark and quiet and everybody's too tired to cause a fuss around them. 

they decide on skinny-dipping, hiding their clothes in the evergreen bushes around the perimeter of the garden, lest they be stolen in a moment of lacking vigilance. they laugh at nothing, and themselves, which feels much akin to nothing, scott holding her by her hips as she hooks her arms around his shoulders. the water is what really holds them in place, but it's enough to pretend that they're entirely self-sufficient. 

'do they try and kill you often?' she asks through layers of tiredness and drunkenness and the comedown from the acid tab. things were back to their drab, common colours, and scott no longer complained of little people at the edge of the lawn, but the nagging itch was still there in the corner of her brain that something wasn't quite right (though, placebo is a word, she reckons).

'occasionally. I usually don't flip out like that, though.'

'I think that was fair. I'd be pretty pissed if, you know, someone tried to drown me.'

' _two_ someones, no less.'

'exactly. and a third, doing his absolute least to help.'

scott snickers, tilting his head back, making lea wonder if he sees the same things she sees. 'it's fine, really. I know they'd never actually hurt me.' he considers something, bringing his neck back to look at her, backlit by the warm glow from the house, a yellow silhouette in the blackened garden. 'well, they hurt me, but they'd never _really_ damage me.'

'let's hope so,' she says, leaving the conversation there. 'your friends are quite something.'

'well, I thought it was important you got to see the extent of the calamity sooner rather than later.'

'can't say I mind.'

he puts his hands through her hair, stringy and half-dried from the dampness of the water. 'I appreciate that. considering it's hard for me to say the same sometimes.'

'you're fine,' she tells him, wondering if she understands the situation well enough to make such an assumption. she decides that as long as he _thinks_ that way, _perceives_ the situation that way, it's the best she can do. 'I'm sure you could kick their asses, if needed.'

he laughs, pure and unsullied and full of a sort of reckless folly. 'I'm not so sure about that - hey, quick question - '

'yes?'

'is your, like, ring finger bigger than your index, or the other way around? it's driving me nuts... it's different for everyone, which can't be right.' 

lea howls with laughter, almost cruel in its tonality, the reverberations bouncing around the garden. 'oh, god, you really are out of it,' she muses, stroking his hair and taking his lips in her own until he pulls away impatiently.

'yeah, sure, but what's the answer?'

'I, ah,' she looks at her hand, letting go of his shoulders to run a finger along the peaks and troughs of each digit. 'ring finger is larger.' 

'as it should be,' he assures her, nodding sort of sporadically. 'oh, your hands are small. like, _small,_ small. like, not even 'I'm stoned and my brain is fucking with my spatiality'. like, they're _tiny_...'

'you say this as if I've never heard it before,' she tells him, drily, though she's blushing in the darkness, hoping he can't feel her heat. 'besides, how is this the first time you've noticed this?'

'no idea. but, wow. look,' he starts, holding his hands to hers.

'not impressed. _very_ common preamble to physicality,' she feigns a critique. 

'if it's hackneyed, then it's hackneyed for a reason.' 

she tilts her head to the side in thought, the callouses of his fingertips still brushing up and down the softness of her own. 'that's a fair assessment. I can't say I mind this terribly.' 

'can't see why you would,' he comments, almost wistfully. 'anyway, other than almost being drowned, I've had a good day. I'm glad you didn't up and leave after seeing my friends like that.'

'ah, well. it was kind of entertaining. I'm not one to be happy with boredom.'

'then I think we're just right for you.' scott's fingers still along her own, nails pressing into her extending palm. 

'I don't think I needed to be told that. not when it came to you, anyway.'

she hears a staggered breath, sort of contented, but caught off guard. the music, lea realising that she hasn't paid attention to the tracks in a good few hours, is now something about hands on hearts, but sung by a blatant _bauhaus-joy division's lovechild_ rip-off, and she can't tell if that annoys her or not. the music is nice, though, and sort of fitting to the day. she's too tired to criticise anything outside of herself, anyway.

'just wanted to put it out there, in case it was just the right phrase to make you turn and run away.'

'and why would you want to do that?' she interrogates, pushing herself against him again, aware of each inch of their bare flesh pressed together, a thin fluid barrier being the only thing between them.

she feels him lift a shoulder. 'just to make sure.'

'I hope you've got your answer.'

the water laps against them, the splashing sound being the most emphatic input around the pair other than the sounds of their voices or staccato breathing. 

'I hope I do, too.'


	6. smking to dth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a conversation about colour theory and kosher wines - sort of.

lea cracks the dilapidated bathroom window open, freeing the box-room from the fetid scent of peroxide dye. she holds her face in the open air for a little while, a breeze tangling in her hair intermittently, a welcome opposition to the warmth of the apartment. she hears the sound of the bathtub creaking, turning around just as scott swings his legs in just the right way to catch the side of the plastic tub and press the already-loosened panel into the pipes and plumbing it once concealed. 

'good going,' lea laughs as scott hisses his irritation, clamouring around the skeleton of the appliance to try and repair it. 

lea crouches down and pulls his hands away. 'leave it. it'll just get punched in again, anyway.'

'I feel like they should've said _hey, eighty-percent of your appliances are pieces of shit_ when they sold us this place,' he grouses.

lea perches herself on his knee, arms around his shoulders. 'to be fair, this is only a lease.'

scott tuts and squeezes her waist. 'you're such a wise-ass.'

'and don't you love it?'

-

scott, now sitting on the countertop, eyes lea as she mixes the blue dye with the chemicals, some of the pigmentation dripping out onto the tiles. 

'apparently, if I don't open this fast enough after mixing it, it'll explode everywhere,' she says with a sort of off-handedness with which you'd tell your parents that your day was _fine,_ after which promptly sequestering yourself to your room. 

subconsciously, scott tugs the hand-towel (already stained dark browns, blacks, and purples from lea's own dyeing excursions) closer around his shoulders. 'oh, _wonder_ ful. just what I wanted to hear.'

the final drops of the viscous colouring seep from the cylinder and lea's brow smooths as she stops concentrating - you'd think she was dyeing the hair of royalty with the attention she's giving it, and he tells her so.

she shakes the bottle until there's a solid colour throughout and snaps off the top of the applicator, a small glob of the mixture frothing out. wincing, she positions herself between his legs and brushes her fingers against his jaw to tilt his head downward. 

'I am, in a way. I may hate the idea of actual aristocracy, but - ' she pauses, massaging the cold gel into his roots - 'you matter to me the way the queen of england matters to her royalist sycophants. well, the competency of your dye-job does, at any rate.'

scott doesn't know what to say, figuring that he doesn't mind so much as it allows lea's own sentiment to linger with him for a little longer without his noise pollution. there's this pressing feeling in his chest that he's been feeling a lot lately, and it's uncomfortable, sure, but it's not as if he wouldn't mind feeling it forever. the first time round he'd wondered if he was having a heart attack, or even an aneurysm; however, he had finally conceded that the sensation was indicative of a much more figurative haemorrhaging of the organ, his ribs constricting against the release of whatever it was to try and salvage, maybe, some of the more precarious parts of himself that could be lost, or damaged, or manipulated, just as they had before.

-

scott looks at himself in the mirror as lea reaches up to lather the remnants of the dye onto the back of his hair. topaz splotches stain his temples and neck from where his hair had fallen forward and licked his skin. 

he strains his neck to the side and smiles at the smear above his collar bone. 'it looks like a hickey.'

she appears from behind him, chin on his shoulder. 'I can give you a real one, if you like it so much.'

scott scrubs at the mark with his knuckles. 'maybe later, I don't want to have to take you to the hospital for ingesting some corrosive substance.'

she disappears again and lifts up some of his hair to reach the bottom layers. 'that _would_ be rather inconvenient of me.'

scott snorts. 'I'll say. at least finish my hair.'

a few more squirts of the bottle and bordering-on too-rough massages later, she strips off the gloves and beams at him in the mirror, declaring her 'frankenstein' completed.

'frankenstein's monster,' scott corrects, not without a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.

' _now_ who's the wise-ass?'

-

'so, my parents want to meet you,' she admits, voice garbled by the water rushing over his head from the faucet, water so quintessentially blue that it looks like a cartoon flowing in front of his eyes as it grows saturated from his hair. 'you can totally say no, but I was thinking of going back up there for hanukkah in november, and - '

'I'd love to. I mean, I'd like to meet them, sure.'

lea turns the tap off, wringing his hair damp and kissing him just above the neckline of his shirt. 

'I'll tell them they've got another mouth to feed, then.'

as lea throws the applicator and the box in the bin, clearing up the bathroom, scott picks up his hair, a clump at a time, regarding himself in the mirror. it being this wet, in this odd, just-after-sunset lighting, it looks like it could be completely black, as black as the space around them and as black as tree branches in the snow, juxtaposed to the bright white, the veins of winter. 

'are they going to want me to be all religious?' he asks, trying to conceal the fret in his voice. 'I think I can sort of remember... some of the rules. no chametz after mid-day on the... something-th day of nissan.'

'stellar memory,' lea nods her approval. she rubs his forearms tenderly. 'but, no, not one bit. I never even had my bat mitzvah.'

'no?'

'didn't want to. bless my parents, they told me it was coming up and I said I didn't want one,' she starts, smiling fondly and drying her hands with a towel absent-mindedly. 'I said I didn't want to be jewish and they asked what I wanted to be instead. I think they were expecting me to convert to buddhism or some such. I find it endearing that they were totally receptive to the idea. no qualms or anything, just disappointed that they couldn't get egregiously drunk off of bartenura moscato with a good excuse. I always preferred caramel king david, anyway.'

scott plugs the hairdryer into the wall and bites the inside of his cheek, still considering the optics of meeting her family. once he blowdries, there's no longer any plausible deniability that his hair is a vibrant blue as opposed to some natural, respectable colour, an illusion propagated by the damp still clung to the strands. his thumb hovers over the _on_ button, looking at his hands as he debates prodding further.

'lea?'

'yeah, baby?'

'are your family gonna mind that I've got, y'know - ' he gestures to his head with the mouth of the hairdryer. 'this going on?'

she looks up from where she's started painting her nails. 'what? of course not. jaron dyed his hair hot pink when he was, what, sixteen? all my mom did was offer to touch up his roots.'

'so, they don't care that I'm in a vehemently atheistic band? borderline blasphemous?'

'only borderline?'

'ha, ha,' he intones. 'I'm serious, lea. I don't want them to think I'm a nutjob.'

'I've already told you,' she sighs, growing exasperated, 'they _will not care_. they've dealt with me, and jaron. besides, you'll be such a breath of fresh air for them.'

'how so?'

she puts the top back on the purple nail polish and shakes it, setting it on the windowsill where the wind had blown mostly-empty bottles of lotions and creams and bags of cotton swabs over and onto the floor, before standing up to meet his eye. 'you're smart. you've got an opinion on _everything_ without being threatening about it because you smile like a complete dork whenever you express them, even if it's something like: _I'd murder ronald reagan while he slept_.'

lea smiles, sort of sadly, and pulls him in for a deep, lingering kiss, running her thumb along his bottom lip after she pulls away. 'plus, you're _really_ hot,' she embellishes.

'that's hardly _fresh air_ for your parents,' he whispers in her ear, pressing his lips to her eyelid and romanticising the way a droplet of water, still tinged a melancholy blue, drops from the ends of his hair and rolls down the side of her face, curving satisfyingly over her cheekbone. she wipes it away like you would a tear, and tells him to get on with drying his hair. 

'yes, ma'am,' he mutters, smiling to himself, an emotion within him needing to be expressed too exigently to be concealed.

-

'so, does blue suit me?' scott asks, standing in the doorway to the living room, arms spread outwards augustly to coax her attention away from the dennis cooper book in her lap, which she's grimacing at. 

'definitely. it's not like a sad blue, either. not like royal, or navy. more like teal.' she purses her lips in consideration. 'yeah. you look great. it compliments your skin, you've always been a little tanner than your friends.'

'that's because I don't use toothpaste for foundation,' he smirks, slumping down on the sofa next to her and taking the book from her lap to read whatever had made her look so dour. 'did you just use the colour wheel in relation to my complexion?' he ventures, skimming the lines and lines of text. 

'I may have.' she sidles up to him, latching onto his arm like a koala. 'the colour wheel my art college used included a shade which was lovingly dubbed _cow dung_.' 

'bet that was popular - oh, is this the part you were offended by?'

he holds his thumb by the paragraph in question, the first of the 'snuff' expositions, thrusting it under her nose. she skims it, faking a gag.

'ugh, yes. the whole _I like them skinny, pale, and hairless_ rung a little... paedophilic to me.' 

'I concur,' scott says, closing the book and throwing it onto the coffee table, hitting his head back against the cushion of the couch. 'you know, I haven't been able to mention art theory since... ever. I always get called pretentious for it.'

lea crawls further onto his lap, fulfilling the promise of a real hickey from earlier, getting words in between licks and bites and sucks. 'I, for one... like the colour wheel... ugh, your neck tastes like ammonia - oh, how's this for ironic,' she starts, sitting up while on his lap, wiping a thin sheen of saliva away from her lips with the tip of her thumb.

'what?'

'the first time I dyed my hair, I did it with grape kool-aid. it was meant to be violet but it came out this putrid seaweed green. I rocked up to my class the next morning and presented myself as a good example of ' _opposite but complementary colours','_ she says in a put-on, disturbingly posh, British accent. 'no one got it, of course, I was being far too convoluted. I thought it was funny, though.' 

'I'm with your classmates on that one.'

'fuck you,' she hums coquettishly, retrieving the book, as she's never opposed to a good hate-read. 

he watches her profile as she reads, a smile still on her lips from moments before. he cranes his body around her own to peck her on the lips. 

'you're annoying, putesky.'

'and I'm bored. there's a drive-in movie at swap shop tonight. we can look around the flea markets, rob a liquor store...' he drawls suggestively, walking his fingers over the book again to close it gently on her thumb. she pouts at him, and he pouts back. 

'alright, alright. which movie?'

they stand up and pick their coats from the hanger, scott dropping the keys with more success than he was getting them in the door. 

'you know, I've got no idea.'

'ooh, some mysticism,' she teases, stepping out the door, scott following suit.

'I know what makes you tick,' he returns, the words echoing in the stairwell along with their footsteps as they head out to the main road, leaving the empty apartment behind - cold from the window still ajar, faintly reeking of chemicals, and dark, impersonal; ostensibly uninhabited. 


	7. growing up again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fall is inevitable, not to say inevitability is always a bad thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unprompted! this time with added diet smut. feel free to... you know... prompt me some more... written to Evangeline by the Cocteau Twins

there's a heatwave in florida - which is a crying shame, since scott and lea are holed up at his family's house in hackettstown for thanksgiving.

'why couldn't we have stayed in florida? I was just getting used to the whole _no seasons_ thing. it's making me homesick.'

'I wanted you to meet my family. well, actually, they wanted to meet _you_ ,' scott considers, tapping her on the head with the issue of rolling stone he was half-reading.

'I'm glad I'm worth their time.'

'I can't see why you wouldn't be. my uncles can finally relate to me on the carnal level of having sex with women.'

'as opposed to having sex with men?'

'I'm all too sure that's what they thought I've been doing for the past few years.'

she turns over from where she lays in his lap, hair spread out across his legs. her eyes move across his face but at no point does he feel their eyes meet. he puts the magazine on the end table, nearly sending the gritty, long-gone-cold cup of coffee flying over the fluffy white carpet, turning his fingers' attention to running through her hair. he likes how it's soft and malleable, curling all over the place and lightened at the ends from what felt like a year-long summer under the searing sun in boca raton.

'you're cute.'

he scoffs and looks at the ceiling lamps. a spider twirls its way down from one of the golden spires (ostensibly, that is - he'd seen his grandfather painting the reddish copper the horrible yellow-gold in the shed when he was about ten, who then swore him to secrecy from telling his grandmother). 

'wanna go for a drive?'

-

scott haggles with his aunt for the decrepit honda in the barn-turned-garage, lea slung behind him, taking in the small kitchen. it smells of kraft dinner and old wood, a chilly air coming in through the thin, rectangular window just above the sink. in the yard of the house over the road, a skin-headed man (who she's come to know as randy, and that she should stay away from him under most circumstances, unless they need somebody _young and pretty_ to convince him to do the handiwork around the house) sits on his ride-on, dutifully mowing his lawn. 

'your mother told me that you got a d.u.i. - '

'it's two in the afternoon, I'm hardly going to get another one.'

'if it's any help, mrs. putesky, he didn't even get one the first time around.'

scott looks between her and his aunt, gesturing to her as if to say _see?_

'I'm twenty-five years old,' he says as his final gambit.

his aunt frowns, and drops the keys into his hand. 

'take her somewhere nice!' she shouts from the porch, his grandfather and younger cousins sat on the wooden rocking chairs, shucking corn and dumping the thick leaves and finicky, stringy hairs onto a tray that details all the different kinds of coffee you could possibly make. the white chairs are decorated with yellow pillows, upholstered by his grandmother years and years ago, and cushions embroidered with the sun, purchased at a flea market in trenton. 

-

they roll down mountain avenue, which is pleasantly empty, the sun ducking in and out of the trees that border the musconetong river which curves towards the road as they pass the dunkin' donuts with a flickering _k_ and _u_ in the former word. lea rests her head on the door, window rolled down completely and inviting a rush of autumnal air into the car that makes her skin pucker with the cold. scott begins to shiver beside her, the hair on his arm standing on end as he grips the gearstick. she rolls it up, just a tad.

'thank you,' he says absently.

'where're we going?'

'not to make a caricature of myself or anything, but - ' he drawls, swinging the car to the left. 'union cemetery. best place to see the leaves. it's nice and quiet, no people around... not like the thanksgiving _little leagues_ game at the actual park.'

she grins at him, watching the world darken gently as they pass under the canopy of trees leading to the cemetery.

'were you ever in little leagues, babe?' she teases.

he lolls his head to the side as he parks the car on the curb, scrunching his face to make his sunglasses drop down his nose so he can glare over the rims. 'now, what do _you_ think?'

'I think you'd be hot in a helmet. swinging a bat around.'

'well, I can think of a few more contexts for that,' he mumbles, getting out of the car, burying his voice in the car's distressed pinging at unbuckled seatbelts.

' _what_ _?'_

he rests his arms on the roof of the car, grinning coquettishly at her over the muddied surface, covered in fallen leaves and seeds and specks of dirt. he turns and walks up the shallow concrete steps, a welcome sign branded by the salvation army laminated and tacked to a rotting wooden post.

'no, really, you can't just drop something like that out there - ' she laughs, running around the car to catch up to him, nearly flooring him as she plants her hands on his shoulders, hauling herself onto his back. 

-

'this guy died on your birthday.'

'like, the year and everything?' she calls from the end of the row of graves, admiring the flowers and tattered stuffed animals and laminated _I miss you, daddy_ messages rather than looking at names and dates.

'yep.'

'creepy. maybe he got reincarnated into me.'

'nice to meet you, revamped harold rabinowitz.'

'harold two: electric boogaloo.'

'you're lame, you know that?' he says as he appears behind her, resting his head on her shoulder. 

'and yet you travelled twelve-hundred miles north with me so I could meet your extended family.' 

'point taken.' he sucks gently at the skin on her neck, leaving a half-formed hickey behind, really just a sparse trail of deep purple spots. 'let's go find mine.'

they wander around the edge of the cemetery, lea dragging her feet through the wealth of fallen leaves, the saccharine smell of their rot permeating the air as they decay and fade on the earth. she picks up the ones that are still flat and comprised of garnet and carmine splotches and canary veins, showing them to scott for approval before placing them delicately, stem first, into the pockets of her woollen jacket.

'you're like morrissey and his fucking lilies.'

'don't act as if you wouldn't do the _exact_ same thing with those huge daisies - gerberas, you know what I mean? - if you didn't think you'd get your ass kicked on sight for it.'

scott sighs. 'I hate when you're right.'

'I don't.' 

he shoulders her, and she shoulders him back, the two of them ricocheting off of each other until lea ends up ass first in a pile of leaves obviously raked together at some point earlier in the fall and abandoned there. she stays there in protest until he's ready to leave, having found somebody who died on april 28th, albeit in 1845.

'that's actually totally on brand for you.'

'what?'

'being reincarnated from someone so goddamn old.'

she ends up in another pile of leaves, though having the forethought to grab his wrist and drag him down with her this time. 

-

when they get back in the car, scott puts the keys in the ignition, but doesn't turn them. instead, they look at each other, something tense and unspoken in the inches between them. scott leans over the console, pressing his lips to her own. lea shifts so her arm reaches across to rest on his lap, aggravatingly so close and yet simultaneously so removed from his body. 

'anyone could see us,' he breathes as he pulls away briefly, not opening his eyes.

'good.'

he untucks her shirt from the waistband of her jeans, gripping the hem and pressing his cold knuckles into her torso before pulling it over her head, albeit slamming his arms into the ceiling of the car and leaving it stuck halfway up her face.

'I'm such a jackass, how do you _possibly_ find it in yourself to fuck me?' he groans, leaning away, embarrassed.

she pulls the long neck of fabric from her face and casts it into the footwell of the passenger side. 'like this.' 

and, in no time, they're in the backseat of his aunt's honda accord, defiling it in a worse way than she'd probably imagined, his head between her legs and her hands slapping the window just above her head in euphoria, only accentuated by the thrill of seeing foreign headlights spilling through the glass and cutting bright yellow shapes in the darkness.


	8. stay and fail and fail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you're much more brighter than the sun is to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heaven or las vegas - cocteau twins

there's an abject horror that accompanies knowing that you've gone too far; done too much; taken too many illicit substances; scott's lying on the bed in freddy's hotel room, the cracks on the ceiling swirling into one, big, black spiral, the abstract paintings on the wall adjacent to him mutating and dredging up things he purposefully resolves not to think about. someone's slapping his arm, wide eyes just about levelling with his over the edge of the mattress.

'you're fucked up, man,' brian tells him, flicking his arm once more. 'you alive?'

'maybe,' scott says. 'you don't look great, yourself.'

brian rolls his eyes and staggers to the window, throwing the curtains in either direction, but to scott it looks like he's ripping an animal's torso clean open. what the fuck did he take? he decides to ask brian, but he either doesn't hear him, or understand him, or consciously ignores him, because he doesn't get an answer either way. he wants brian to tell him that it's nothing, he's just overtired and it's making it worse. two kinds of brain-rot acting at once. still, scott can't help but feel as if he's thinking wishfully. 

the world outside, beyond the tall buildings with disgusting neon lights, advertising overly-expensive hotel chains and gratuitous strip clubs and pay-to-play casinos, there's a red desert, desecrated and shrivelled in on itself, no life within it to speak of - then again, scott figures you could say the same about the city. it hurts his eyes. he rolls away, and vomits on the sheets. 

'oh, fuck _you,_ ' brian snaps, the weight of his platform shoes beating hard against the carpet. scott, as he rolls away from the pool of discoloured bile, devoid of any ground-up chunks of food - _god, when was the last time I ate? -_ wonders what the people in the rooms below must think. there was never a dull moment from their rooms, he can only imagine the kinds of putative stories that exist about them in cities in any number of states. scott finds his way to the bathroom, which just _reeks_ of pot, and decants more of his insides into the grimy bowl. 

'what did I take?' scott pleads.

brian's next to him, narrow legs right by his head. scott, still, has to hold his own hair back, some of the viscous fluid having smeared itself in the strands already. the feeling of it on his skin makes him vomit more. 

'someone must've cut some shit into it.'

'what's _it?'_

'just coke, nothing bad,' brian tells him casually, moving to lean against the rim of the sink. 'nothing we haven't done before.'

'well, it obviously _is_ ,' scott shoots back, spluttering once more to get the final spittle out of his mouth, turning himself over to slump against the toilet with an agonised huff. brian's smirking at him, and, for a split second, it makes him feel anger on such a visceral level, he's surprised he doesn't throw up again from the rush that it carries. 

'what?' 

'your hair's turning green.'

scott thinks it's a gross joke, referencing the bile, until he lets it hang down again, out of his hands. it was; sort of a garish lime-y shade, not dissimilar to the lights of the city. you don't see lights like the ones in vegas in other cities, regular cities, that exist on a solid plane of reality. 

'that's... well, it's something,' scott finally manages, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.

'do you wanna hit up a casino? jeordie just broke even off a dime downstairs.'

'can I clean up first?'

'I'd insist on it.'

-

scott's hair is still wet from the shower when they reach the lobby, brian walking ahead of him to the broad corridor, lined with marble and faux-gold statues of roman gods (which, on arrival, jeordie had stared at, high out of his mind, until he finally went _'ohh, caesar, like rome. yeah. I get it, now_. _'_ ), which led to the restaurants and gift shops, and eventually, sequestered away in a windowless, red-tinted corner of the hotel, the casinos. 

'I think you need a drink,' brian tells him, almost as if it were a collusion. scott pushes him away and shakes his head, skin still crawling and stomach still churning from the ongoing comedown. he's alive, he thinks, and that's all he needs to know. 

'suit yourself. if you wanna go sit on the kid's table, that's fine by me, but -'

'can you pick your moments to be an asshole? my head's in a fucking vice, I really don't need this.'

brian ignores him, spotting jeordie lingering in the entrance to the pizza place that looks as if it was lazily built into the wall, the mute scent of grease emanating from it. he's holding a slice, which looks about the size of a quarter of an actual pizza, waving at the pair of them with the oily triangle, melted cheese with mottled yellows and oranges dripping off of it. 

'scott looks bad,' jeordie comments, gnawing at the tip. 'want any?'

scott turns it down, beginning to shiver despite standing in the heat of the circular atrium. you're one to talk, he thinks, looking at his pasty, brow-less face, lipstick smeared around his chin, but knows better than to do that. it was enough to have thought it at all. 

brian manages to drag him into the casino; the difference between this part of the hotel, dark and hour-less, and the shimmering, inviolableness of the main sections, starts fucking with his head, like he's already losing hours and time and money and sensibility, just from standing in the vicinity of the sweaty, overweight businessmen and skinny addicts (gambling, or narcotics, or both) spinning and failing and spinning and failing, twitching their fingers over the levers and buttons, their faces lit with red and white and blue, as if that made it any more acceptable. 

'brian told me you broke even,' scott says to jeordie.

'I guess,' he says, tossing the half-eaten pizza in the trash and sitting at one of the machines, popping in quarter after quarter.

scott stands by himself in the entrance, his heart still alternating between skipping beats or thumping too fast against his chest. he considers going back upstairs, even to fall back asleep next to his own waste, but the distance is too far; and the woman running the poker table for all the gamblers that still have a sex drive kind of reminds him of lea, so maybe he would stay, and spin, and fail, too.

-

the flower's she's been painting, arranged messily in an emptied bottle of limoncetta, are beginning to wilt and fade. she looks from her approximation of them, luscious and perking up away from the sharp rim of the glass, to the reality before her: heavy heads of dying flowers drooping down as their once-verdant stems (now more of a muted, olive colour) can't sustain them anymore. lea picks up the bottle, still sticky around the edges from having the saccharine alcohol dribble down it on the occasion she or scott felt they'd overestimated their dose, and tried (unsuccessfully) to funnel it back in. she tips the marigolds out of the window, and sets the bottle down by the door to take out to the bins. 

scott's in vegas, which is never a nice thought - then again, him being anywhere often made for sleepless nights. amongst the usual insecurity of him sleeping with someone else, there's always the fear of the four a.m. phone call - or, worse, purely because of the depravity it connotes, mid-afternoon - to tell her he'd overdosed; or the call to say there'd been a road accident, or any other sort of accident; or just any and all bad things that could happen. they could happen here too, sure. they could even happen to her and put scott on the receiving end of a terse phone call, but... something about his particular situation, maybe it was the people he was with, maybe it was the multifarious people they attracted (or, equally, repulsed), that made each scenario that little bit more likely. 

she sits on the stool, chewing on the end of a paintbrush, not as bothered as usual about knocking her teeth against the dried paint. she looks at the painting, decides she hates it (in the arbitrary way in which she hates _everything_ she does, purely because she'd convince herself it was boring and hackneyed, but in a similar sentiment, she also thinks that artists hating their work for no other reason than they feel obliged to is probably more boring and hackneyed than anything she could ever produce) and goes to lie down on the bed, alone, with too much space to roll over, and no-one to accidentally push her off in the middle of the night. lea resigns herself to the fact that she isn't getting a phone call tonight, and tries to avoid looking at all the negative space in the room, unoccupied by smell, or taste, or anything she could quantify by holding it in her hands.

-

scott, all in all, loses a hundred-and-fifty dollars, which isn't bad, considering jeordie's running between bandmates and roadies and managers in the corridors, tweaking out about a loss that oscillated in value between three-hundred and eight-hundred, depending on who he was talking to (scott thinks he's figured out the pattern: the more likely they are to beat his ass over something so puerile, the lower the number got). 

in the lobby, scott can finally see the light of day - which is actually just a darker shade of night than he'd walked down to earlier on. the passage of night is a harder time frame to quantify, there's simply not enough variation between the blacks and blues bruising the sky, not like the sun carrying cold whites of the afternoon into rich yellows of sunset, or effeminate lilacs of the gloaming. he presses his fingers into his pockets, depressing the top of the cigarette carton and jingling the remainder of his spare change; he splits off from the group, migrating back to their rooms, feeling as if carcinogens and the odd quarter or dime are enough to allow him to last some more of the night like a stray animal outside of the hotel. 

he steps into the night, and it's more humid than anything he'd ever been confronted with back home, uncomfortable days wandering around in unrevealing clothes because to show any more of his teenage self to the world had, at that point in time, felt like the ultimate violation. he thinks then to mesh tops, shirtless videos of him populating mtv, skirts, dresses, crop-tops, and how he's, ostensibly, a completely different person. 

then, he pukes all over the side of the building, thankfully close enough to the ghastly alley leading to the less _showy_ parts of this 'paradise', that the lights of the city don't illuminate him in any way, and thinks: maybe this _is_ a completely different person. you never sense yourself change, only when juxtaposed to those that characterise your evolution; and maybe throwing up in hotel rooms and up the side of an extravagant buildings in las vegas, blowing money down the drain - that just about anybody else in this country would eviscerate him to have - as if it were _nothing,_ are all actions that carry enough little pieces of the very people that have helped him to accomplish this change (though, maybe _help_ isn't the most befitting word) to let him recognise that the kid that went into all of this six years ago won't be the kid that comes back out of it. 

he wipes his mouth on his sleeve, the smell seeping into the fibres, undoubtedly planning on clinging to the threads of cotton for the foreseeable future, a perpetual reminder of this night (maybe this whole period). there's pay phones outside the hotel, he spots, torn and faded advertisements for circuses and burlesque shows and rod stewart concerts plastered to the metal. he lights a cigarette, the walls that isolate each phone from each other keeping the smoke around his head as he breathes in the same exhale, over, and over, and over, again. 

he puts in the number to their home phone, which rings itself dead, finally acquiescing to voicemail. 

'lea, hey. it's me. the show was okay. and, ah...' he rubs the back of his neck, feeling some of the hot ash drop from the end of the roll and onto his skin. he doesn't even flinch, much less feel it. 'I just gambled away a hundred-and-fifty dollars. and twelve cents.' 

he bites on his tongue, seeing how hard he could bite before his body stopped him from hurting it anymore. 

'I just felt like you should know that. you can call me back and yell at me, if you want. I might finally feel something again, ha...' 

was that a joke? he isn't sure. scott presses his forehead to the metal divider. 

'anyway, I just wanted to leave you a message, maybe to wake up to. how's everything going? sorry they cancelled the showcase, by the way. I got your letter the other night. there'll be others, maybe with better people. you don't want to end up, uh... sorry, I've taken something pretty fucked up. no-one's telling me what it was. they're all being cagey. maybe I'm just paranoid. anyway, what was I saying? something about art. yeah. I think that's...' he drags his foot around the concrete in a circle, listening to the crunch of the gravel and dried flower petals scattered around the floor. 'I think that's all. colorado next. not sure how they'll receive us. no bomb threats so far, if you're wondering. well, one, but nothing came of it.' 

he counts to ten in his head, and swallows something. 

'I love you, okay? I love you. I do. I'll call you at a more reasonable hour next time. sorry. bye.' 

he puts the phone on the receiver and slumps against the metal. what looks like half the cigarette drops off in an ephemeral tube of grey ash, little flecks of fire attached to it as it hits the floor, and it feels like a weight off his shoulders.


	9. the court jester's skull

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> thunderstorms, a skyline, and a fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why am I still writing this no one likes it yooooo. so anyway trying to bring my style back to what it was in the first chapter because I didn't like 2/3 in their tonality. hope this is... better? it rings truer, to me, at least.

the massachusetts skyline is peppered with reds, and yellows, and whites, and vacant windows that must lead to another part of the world entirely. the warning flashes of the red on radio towers, begging planes not to clip them with their wings; the clement yellows of street lamps far enough in the distance that they become elevated to eye level when you're on the sixteenth floor of a hotel; the accusatory white of car headlights, angrily driving down the snippets of the i-93 just visible - these are the _real_ all-seeing eyes. 

white electricity flashes violently across the sky, picking out the outlines of clouds and forcing the constant sound of cars honking to grow ever more emphatic, desperate to get out of the storm. there's no thunder, not yet.

her weight shifts on top of him from where they sit on the earthy, floral-patterned couch, which is positioned right up against the window that stretches across the entire wall. 'do you ever think that something causes that?'

he takes his mouth away from her hair. 'yes, electrical currents in the the atmosphere.'

'no, smart-ass, something greater than that.'

'I'm agnostic,' he almost apologises.

'everybody's an agnostic,' she tells him, turning to look at him just as another flash of lighting explodes, somehow closer than the last, and pitches splotches of white onto her face, accentuating the shadows of the darkened room. she looks away. 'you have to pick a side - atheist, or theist. agnosticism admits being none the wiser, which, of course, all of us are.'

he wonders when the thunder would finally start, and the rain. the lighting always happens first, making spidery, stalk-like shapes in the sky that could contort into humanistic simulacrums if you squinted hard enough to where the sky lay beyond the skyscraper, or the middle-American suburban bungalow with the nice front porch and chipped paint.

he pulls her closer by the waist. 'like I said. electrical currents in the atmosphere.' 

-

there're dots of rain all over the window now, turning the night lights of the city into a kaleidoscope of ugly, impersonal colours. scott's smoking on his side of the couch, while she counts the _mississippis_ between rolls of thunder. she looks at him, jaw pressing forward slightly to emit a small puff of smoke, watching the city - her city - tentatively, blue hair just scraping his jaw. she loves the colour, but why she can't tell him, she doesn't know. 

he casts a worried glance to the smoke detector in the short corridor of the room that they'd taken a screwdriver to upon arrival, knowing they could just pin it on 'wild groupies', or production managers, or maybe jeordie, if they felt like it. when he looks back, he catches her eye in the darkness that was slowly fading from the violent black they'd stumbled into earlier in the night to a softer grey that reminded her of one of the colours in her oil paint set - paynes, she thinks. he smiles. and she smiles. and he looks back out the window, and asks her how far away the thunder is.

'six.'

exhale. smoke crawls up the window and condenses immediately, for the room is unbearably warm despite the thermometer only reading fifty-five, and the world out there must be bitterly, bitterly cold. 

she loves him, but why she can't tell him, she doesn't know.

-

they're intertwined again, but this time he's got his back against her chest, holding her hands (that he's so fond of showing her how little they are compared to his by engulfing her fist within his own, or taking her hand and demonstrating how he can fold an entire knuckle over the tips of her fingers, often met with a _jeez, scott, I get it,_ lathered with feigned boredom and complacency but never without a smile) to his stomach. the thunder is right above them, the rain lashing harder, and harder - this, however, is not loud enough to drown out the loud rammstein being played in the room to their left, and the screaming match raging in the room on their right. scott tries to determine whether or not he should be envious of the debauchery, lying here quietly with his girlfriend while she talks softly, and mainly to herself, about a poet called frederico lorca (a name scott commits to memory, just out of habit). he decides, as somebody is slammed into the wall to their right, causing the garish pictures hung on the walls to quiver and threaten to clatter right down onto the tv, that he's beyond elated that this is how he spent this night, for he won't have any choice but to join in on the after parties in dingy hotel rooms (though, the more they played, the more the quality improved, and all that served to do was make him more uncomfortable) and be a passive witness to drunken arguments, sexual arguments, financial arguments, violent arguments... 

so, yes, he thinks. he’s quite content to sit here, vulnerable, in a position he'd just about die if anybody walked in on them now. there's another bang, and it's jeordie's voice yelling for somebody to _just cut it out, man_ , and in stephen's room the music and laughter gets louder, and he's struck with the dichotomy. he shuts his eyes, as if that would stop him from thinking about it too hard. how did it get like this? she tells him she loves him, and suddenly interpersonal band relations are the least of his worries. he doesn't know what to say to that, so he dumbly repeats the words like a playback, and he'll be relieved later on when he thinks that it couldn't have gone any other way.

-

you always think the first blows are the worst, but the fighting gets more and more dramatic, ebbing and flowing between lulls of silence and grunting and bedposts knocking together like teenage knees. lea's scared, he knows that, he can feel her tense behind him, and he wishes that he could pull the meretricious veil back up over this part of his life and leave her curious for more, more that he'll never give her in hopes that he can just pass it by, unscathed. even stephen and ken had gone to bed, or at least quietened down, but whatever was going on... the tide wouldn't go back out again. 

'you live like this? all the time? all this time?'

'yeah.'

'why've you never told me?'

'because I thought if the knowledge only existed here, _it_ would only exist here. nobody else ever talks about it, the morning after.'

'like bad sex.'

'sure.'

-

to make it easier for herself, she imagines that she doesn't know the people in the next room over, and nor does scott, and that they're just here to meet her mother or her grandfather, or just on a vacation as a couple, or something more... bearable. less drug-fuelled, less uncanny, less... being with the sort of people who set up a torture chamber backstage - an image she's still trying to paint over in her mind.

'scott?' she whispers into the shadows, the light of the city dimming and the storm long gone. 

'lea?'

she runs her palm over his forehead, sweeping back his hair.

she means to say _nothing,_ or, _just checking_ , but instead it comes out as: 'I like the colour.'

'of the backs of your eyes?' 

'of your hair.'

'oh.' his mouth twitches, masking something she recognises as akin to pride, or the pre-empt to gloating to somebody who thought otherwise. 'thank you. it wasn't intentional. it was supposed to be like... cerulean.'

'art school never left you, huh?'

'and you never left art school.'

-

someone starts mouthing somebody else off on the streets below, which is a gross back-alley they'd had to enter the hotel through after the show. there's the familiar sound of skin hitting skin heavily, and wetly, and purposefully. scott cringes as a mass hits what sounds like the large, metallic garbage cans lined up against the side of the hotel, and somebody starts throwing around the word _cunt_ and _bastard,_ while another keens in pain. somebody drums a rhythm onto the wall that divides their room from his, lucidly yet somehow dissonant. in the other, no more slamming, nor screaming, just creaking and moaning and demands to _turn the fuck over_. lea's asleep behind him, and is probably better off for it. 

scott is grateful that he can keep his hands still.


	10. talk about anything, anything, with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> new years day, 1996, following somewhat of a... troubled concert.

it's the time of the twenty-four hour cycle where whether it's considered late or early is entirely dependant on your previous state of being - for scott (staggering lividly into the hotel room) it's late; and for lea (knocked out just after midnight having forced herself through jools holland's _hootenanny,_ and enjoying the heady feeling of coming down with a cold) it's disorientatingly early. 

'what's that matter with you?' she grouses from the double bed, swamped in sheets that remain stone-cold, despite being laid in for hours, and feel artificial as they maintain their un-lived-in stiffness. the dim, orange overhead lights flood the room in an instant and she throws her face back into the pillows, grumbling into the fabric. 

there's a clattering from the space at the foot of the bed and it's the sound of the desk chair being flopped down upon and swivelled from side to side in agitation. lea lifts her head up as much as her eyes can stand the sudden influx of brightness. it feels like there's a vice around her head and like her skin is souring but, concerned, she finds it in herself to search for him through bleary vision. 

'I'm losing my fucking mind, is what's the matter.'

he's struggling to get his shoes off and appears to be making things worse for himself. the laces tie themselves into double, triple, quadruple knots and his face flushes a deep red, sweat building up in his hairline. he looks epicene, long hair waving with sweat and humidity clung to a fading shade of lipstick pulled gently across his lips. lea wonders if he ever romanticises himself to the extent that she tends to. 

'what've you taken?' she asks, more as a precaution than believing he was so high as to be paranoid and discombobulated.

'just a blow to the fucking head. heavy _fuck_ ing equipment on my feet.'

'sorry?'

he manages to get the boots off and throws them in the direction of the bathroom. 'I nearly hit brian.'

at this she sits up, rubbing her eyes and feeling some mascara still clung to the lashes. 'can you tell me this comprehensively, please? I have a fever.' she forces her eyes wide open to find him not looking at her, but with his chin in his palm and at the bare wall with stains of all kinds splashed upon the beige. 'happy '96, by the way.'

'well, my head hit the concrete of madison square garden at the stroke of midnight, so I don't know if _happy_ covers it, yet.'

'scott,' she pleads lightly, trying to cauterise whatever the emotion boiling within in him is - hot to the touch, but likely cold and waning on the inside - whilst wandering over to the chair, catching him stare appreciatively at the shirt she wears (his cocteau twins one that he could never seem to find in stores since '87, and would doubt its object permanence if he didn't see it every other day). 'what happened?' 

'where do you want me to start?'

-

new years eve being a wretched disappointment is seldom a revelatory experience for anyone, so lea hardly minds that she's spending the waning hours of the morning, raking her fingers through (what's left of) her boyfriend's hair, sat on the edge of the bed as he lays his head in her lap. the sounds of a city-wide celebration float up and buffet against the window, people on the streets below, 8th avenue and west 34th street, triaging which clubs and bars they should hit up next, or the next fireworks display they should walk a few miles to catch the tail-end of, colours faded and withered by the rising sun making the sky a paler navy.

'do you feel concussed at all?'

'it hurts, but I've got all of my faculties.'

'you haven't lost your acerbic witticisms.'

'no?'

'just reassures me, is all.'

-

scott concedes to washing himself off in the dingy hotel shower, which, like every other hotel shower he's seen in the past four years, has little sprouts of mould collecting in each facet (this was fine, really, for if none of them had mutated and grown into a monster far scarier and more deadly than the ones he deals with on a day-to-day basis, the ones made of flesh and blood, what was the point in getting picky about the filth?) to rid himself of the scent of sweat, and blood, and deeply-gripped anger emanating from him. he lathers his hair so full of the cheap shampoo the hotel has to offer that the water hitting the barrier of soap sounds as if he'd stuck his head in a concrete block - this could be solidified by the splitting pain spiralling like an electrical current from the base of his skull to the crown of his head, but that was a pain caused by somebody external to his own will, and scott considers that he'd prefer to feel hurt and discomfort on his own accord for once. that isn't right. this isn't right. it isn't right. right. but _right_ and _wrong_ are concepts that have become unequivocally blurred over the past few years, for things that he's seen and done and said and felt don't quite line up with the people he meets on lonely sidewalks that have fainter concepts of transgression. 

he doesn't think too much about the gentle pressure of congestion building in his nose or the twinge in his throat as a puff of a sob effervesces up in the tissue before the purer, more sterilised water spewing from the stainless-steel shower head is mixing with the salty, acrid water creeping out of his eyes, coming from his body - a dolorous enough thought in and of itself. stupidly, scott thinks belatedly, he brings his soap-laden hands to rub at his eyes, each bubble crackling and popping like the winking of a thousand eyes as it nears his face, and the sting and the blur and the blindness and the falling out of the tight cubicle right onto his side in a scramble for a dry towel and some cold water takes precedence over the nauseating headache. he hates this part of himself; rather, has _grown_ to hate this part of himself: vulnerable, weak, grovelling.

the water's still running. it's about all he can hear. lea knocks at the bathroom door, demanding of him what that cacophony was. he folds, further, further, hearing the door crack open; the plasticky shower curtain scraping against the metal bar; the water turning off; lea's comforting _tsks_ as she puts a hand on his shoulder and forces a towel into his hand which is anything but soft, but it serves to scrape the stinging chemicals out of his eyes. 

'I'm so exhausted.'

-

room service, the pair graciously discover, is available at all hours. they order dessert, and talk in hushed voices in and amongst the puffy bedsheets as they wait for the knock on the door, playing with each other's fingers and hair and bodies like curious teenagers, adolescent versions of themselves still innocent who haven't yet experienced all there was in store for them. neither of them craved that time of their lives, not in any fundamental manner, but maybe in a naive and saccharine way, sepia-tinted, abstracted emotions that felt a little less complicated than whatever they felt now. the only way of getting back to that state, that hazy frame of mind flooding through the wrinkles in their brain where everything feels clean-cut and lucid, is being together, the only semblance of simplicity that seems obtainable. 

'we argued about something pointless during soundcheck.'

'I remember. I was cringing all the way in the back.'

the newscaster playing on the tv gets a little emphatic about something, and they both cast a look towards the blue light in the corner. it cuts to commercial. subaru. stridex. tums. 

'I'm so sorry, baby,' she extends.

scott draws his attention away from a chipper voice announcing the side effects of a laxative being suicidal thoughts and social withdrawal. he shrugs. 'not a lot you could've done, waiting in the wings. he knew what he wanted to do, and he did it.' there's a knock on the door. 'that's just what brian _does_.'

lea waits a minute, regarding him before getting up to answer the door. she can't decide whether his eyes are so red and crippled for being doused in shampoo or the ensuing breakdown on the bathroom floor, strangled cries he had berated himself for letting out but had let himself be cradled and soothed, regardless.

'I love you, scott.'

he watches her stand up, wrapping the short, black gown around herself, shivering against the cold of the room. 

'and I love you.'

-

lea wakes up, probably only a few hours later, cold sun glimmering through barely-closed curtains. he sleeps at her side. she has to go back to florida today. how he'd take that, she doesn't know. 

she sits upright in the bed, hands planted to the soft mattress that some poor underpaid worker would have to clean and deal with, and god-forbid the mess they might see in brian and jeordie and stephen's rooms. she casts a look around the room, something she'd only given a perfunctory glance towards yesterday as she'd been too caught up in the hubbub of soundcheck and lunches and meetings and sorties around manhattan, and then too exhausted to survey it beyond the bed and the bathroom to get ready to sleep through another turning of a year. 

scott shifts and part of her doesn't want him to wake, not just yet. it feels safer for him to be wherever he is right now than to set the ball of the day in motion by opening his eyes and admitting sentience. she lifts a hand and puts it in his hair once more, rubbing a temple. there's a car alarm blaring outside and people talking in the corridor: people living lives that'll never touch lea's, or scott's, but there's no telling if they would touch theirs. scott stands a chance at touching people's lives, lea ponders, and something about that is so incomprehensible and terrifying she can't indulge the thought much longer. 

'morning, lovely,' he eventually mutters into the fabric of her shirt. 

'morning,' she returns, lifting her palm to let him sit up against her. 'another life begins today.'

he snorts. 'oh, it does?'

'you can only try,' she offers, rubbing his knee. 

he lies back down, curling around her body, nose pressed into the small of her back. lea wonders if they could just leave the empty soufflé ramekins on the nightstand, just to give her mind something to do, like twiddling your fingers together or playing with your hair. 

'I'm so sick of this shit.'

'why don't you leave?'

he creeps a hand to the top of her thigh, fingers scraping the inside of it. 'what else do I have? a degree in graphics. if I have to go back to another print store, I'll kill myself.'

'I feel like something might be killing you, anyway.'

-

his eyes are more than a little lachrymose as they say goodbye - for the fifth, sixth time - in the hotel parking lot (though the first and second, and to a lesser extent, the third and fourth times, weren't so much 'goodbyes' as they were scratching a psychosexual itch before the pair of them had to either abstain or relegate themselves to the trials and tribulations of erotica via a telephone wire). 

'you'll be okay. just a few more dates, yeah?' she says, words lost in his hair as he holds her desperately. 

he nods into her neck. she knows better than to make him speak. 

'be good - ' she pulls away and cups his face in her hands. the air in new york always seems more bitter than other places in the country, and she can't feel his skin beneath her numb fingertips. 'no coke off of... what was it last time..?'

'dwarves,' he manages reluctantly, and with all the disgust he could muster, but not without swallowing something down: something intangible, something that can't be removed surgically or by force; something that sits and festers and overflows until it's too big of a mess to clean up on one's own.

'dread to think what they'll come up with next,' she tries to joke, but it falls as flat as the air. they stand, two solitary figures, a unit, in the snow-dusted parking lot; flashes of dark in and amongst drab, red cars, pale grey concrete, and a white sky, threatening more snow. he holds her hands by her hips, swaying them side to side. the longer she holds on, the worse this gets. 

'I'll send you some polaroids,' she promises, winking sanguinely. he manages a smile that dissolves into his skin almost instantly. 'would you like me to go?'

he shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. 'of course not. but you have to.'

'I'm just prolonging the inevitable.'

'yeah.'

'you'll be home soon.'

'but there's all this time between now and then,' he says, making circles in the powdery snow with the tip of his shoe. 'and then the time after that. I don't know what went wrong, lea. I don't know where.'

'there were signs, red flags,' she supplies. 

'don't think I don't know.'

somebody walks past them, nearly slipping on the ice, sunglasses which read 1996 splayed across their face, the circles in the 9's being used as frames for the auburn-tinted glass. he smirks at the two of them, crudely sticking his forefinger into a circle formed by his other hand. 

'nice hair, fag. very pious,' he jeers, getting into his car just a few spaces away from where lea and scott stand, squealing off into the bleak morning. 

though lea stands gobsmacked, scott chuckles. 'I'm truly amazed someone like that knows the word pious.'

lea has to laugh, it may be the only time they can, and it's a good note to end on. she kisses him a final time, briefly, and opens the door to her car, as if switching off somebody's life support in a split-second decision before you can let your morality and fear overtake you. 

'a few more weeks,' she reminds him, sliding into the driver's seat. 

'and the rest of my fucking life,' he grins, ironically. 

'you're better than that. I'll call you later. or vice versa. I'll only ever be at home, or at the studio, painting my hands to stumps,' she reminds him. 

'I never thought I'd envy that sort of thing.'

'people surprise you.'

'I'll say.'


	11. paralysis

they meet at the bar that night and he just won't talk to her. nothing. black, twisted flowers sprout from his mood and the petals froth forward from it as he runs his lithe fingers around the rim of his pint glass, a sheen over his eyes. she drinks from the cut glass, annoyed by her wasted choice of drink, the white russian tasting rich and sour. 

'are you alright to be here?'

he thinks about it - then he drinks - then he thinks about it again. he shakes his head.

'sorry for dragging you here.'

'don't be.'

'it felt more fair than making you drive all the way there and all the way back.'

she waves down the bar tender and asks for an aperol. 'don't worry about what's fair. not right now. if you need to just go home, we can do that.'

'yeah?'

she scoffs, nudging his bony shoulder. 'god, of course.'

-

there's something pleasant in the quietus of the car ride with her. there's a new dinosaur jr. song on the radio that came out just a week ago that he's not heard enough of yet. he isn't free of his shackles yet, but he likes to imagine a world where he is, where he's sure of his choices and finds solace in them, rather than just in the abstract preambles to the life he wants. 

'how did I end up here?'

'in the car with me? you got tired of your friends and you called me to - '

'no, I know that. I mean how did I end up tired of my friends?'

she stops at an amber light just seeping into the neat circle of red. the indicator ticks internally. 

'they got tired of you, didn't they?'

silence. she lurches the car around the corner and he likes to believe that they're lost.

'but not really. now that I think about it.' she reaches over to grab his hand. 'not really.'

-

they pull into the driveway and he notes the crunch of the gravel and the way she leaves the hallway light on in a way he hasn't before. there's something about it that he appreciates, as if she holds some deeper level of intuition than he did, but of course he knows to leave one light on when the house is empty, anyway. maybe he'd just like to think that everybody's more capable than he is; or maybe he's been contrived to feel such a way. 

'I made salmon for myself tonight, but I can order in if you want.'

'the roads are shitty, and it's late, I feel like that'd be a dick-move.'

'you're plenty accustomed to dick-moves, aren't you?'

a silence floods the room. the house smells new in a way that daisy hasn't smelt it before, and he figures that this is the way it smells to all of their guests. he rejoices in the feeling of being a stranger to something so familiar, on his own admission this time. 

he kisses her. it's soft and quick and sweet and something he hasn't done in a while, but it's what he needs. she kisses him back and puts a hand in his hair, shorter than he suspects she remembers it, and blue instead of green. the roots are growing out, though, and brown was beginning to thread back through it again. he can't wait until he has his hair color back. he wants to be scott again, not daisy. 

'I think I need to leave. like, officially.'

'haven't you already?'

his arms hook around her waist, settling atop her hips. he drives his arms into the bones and finally feels secure. 'I need to call a meeting, or something. I feel as if leaving unexpectedly is needlessly sour.'

'I wouldn't say needlessly.'

they settle on the couch, and debate this some more. daisy wants the tv on, or music, or anything else to fill the background silence, but he can't determine why.

-

they go to bed without eating and daisy's had no input other than the sound of his and her voice, and the perpetual ringing in his ears. he runs a hand over his scalp and is almost moved to tears that it's not bald and bristly anymore. he figures he must be tired, to be so happy over being absolved in this way. did he need to be absolved? he figures he must've done _something_ wrong to be in this position. he can't think about that right now, not while he's home, not while she's in the room, humming something to herself and brushing her hair. 

'what're you putting on your face?'

'primer.'

'what does it do?'

she stops and looks at the bottle. 'you know, I'm not sure, I just like feeling something on my face. it probably causes breakouts.'

he stoops down, t-shirt loose around his body and careening away from his skin. she grabs the loose material. 'hardly.' 

'come to bed, now. you've had a bad day.'

'a bad year,' he tells her, obediently crawling under the sheets beside her.

-

he's almost asleep, and she can tell. his head is heavy on her chest and the rise and fall of his back against her hand is steady and deep.

'you're gonna be alright.'

'mph.'

she thinks about all the times he asked her not to leave him - on tours, when it all got too much, pushed from the stage and forced to watch his things dismantled and fried and melted (not to mention his morale) - but she had anyway. he understood. she knows he understood, but nothing can shake the littlest piece of nagging guilt that it has somehow gotten so bad on account of her selfishness. scott would never tell her, either way, so she figures it unfair to try and determine it for herself, either way. 

'sorry for leaving you, all those times,' she decides on.

'you've never.'

'okay. I haven't,' she agrees, and that's the end of that.

she picks up the hand that isn't curled behind her back and looks at the nails - bitten to the quick or scuffed from fretting on the guitar. they've got some deep blue polish left on them, sporadically chipped and left sitting, immovable. she brings each of the fingertips to her lips, hoping it makes some statement or other. 

'goodnight,' he says.

'yeah. goodnight, scott.'

'you don't call me daisy.'

'no,' she says. 'not anymore.'


	12. conversations with friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> your life through another's eyes, and the five stages of grief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in a dreadful place right now so here comes a slew of sad, post-band chapters :)

scott chain-smokes on their bed, spacing out in and amongst the crumpled bedsheets, grey and patterned with delicate, white swirls. it's a saturday afternoon, their neighbour across the road curating a potent bonfire, the autumnal scent floating in through the open windows on the wind, mixing with the heady scent of turpentine and oil paints as lea works on a canvas in the middle of the room. 

'what're you - ' scott exhales another drag, pushing it towards the ceiling. the downstairs neighbours play some awful paul anka song, a regular occurrence since they'd moved in a few months ago. 'what're you painting?'

she sticks the brush in the turpentine, turning around on the stool. 'you.'

scott pushes himself forward with difficulty, fatigue in every inch of his body. he glimpses the splotch of blue, a curve of black for the shoulder, a sliver of orange for the trousers. 

'from, what, a few years ago?' 

'would you rather me do something more recent?' she posits, applying more colour. 

'no, no. that was probably a happier version of myself, anyway. why immortalise this old mope,' he comments, lying back down and lighting another cigarette.

'you're twenty-eight, you're hardly _old,_ ' she says, leaning over to the nightstand and pulling out a malboro, lighting it and cocking her eyebrows at him. 'mopey, yes. but old, no. oh, hey, do we have any shisha left?'

'you're lucky I love you,' he tells her, eyes closing on the room. it's too bright, despite the city being uncharacteristically overcast. 'and we do, but the hookah's broken.'

'shame. but you're right,' she blows a puff of smoke in his direction, smiling lazily, some white paint clung to strands of her hair that've come loose from the band holding it back. 'I am lucky.'

-

the music's still playing downstairs. scott feels only a little idle, beached out on the mattress as lea works and does something productive - she'd just tell him that he deserves to be relaxed, and just to take it easy, but such fast living over the past few years makes just lying calmly on a bed, in a place that feels safe and guarded, feel alienating and objectionable. he watches her body twitch and move as she works around the large canvas, moving from easel to palette to mug like clockwork, considering how he'd paint her, or draw her, or collage her, if he ever finds it in himself to exert himself creatively again. a churning encompasses his chest, painful and deep, like dread, and grief. 

'lea?'

'yes, love?'

'what's, like, the deepest thing you've ever felt?'

he doesn't look at her, but hears the brush handles clinking against the ceramic of the mug. 'deep in what way?'

scott thinks, holding the smoke in his lungs longer than usual, uncomfortably long. 'as in sad.'

lea doesn't say anything for a while, and carries on painting. the neighbours are now playing a debussy song. scott misses playing in his school band. nobody abused anybody in school band; you just played the imperial march and some rachmaninoff song during the summer concert, and some hackneyed rendition of the nutcracker at christmas. _how the worm turns._

'sorry. did I offend you?'

'why would that offend me?'

'I don't know - ' another drag - 'I just didn't want you to think that I was... you know, I'm not sure.'

'well, whatever you thought, I don't mind. I'm just trying to think about it.'

'alright.' 

she gets up from the stool, stirring the brushes around the mug as if making a cup of tea, or coffee, and places it on the windowsill, leant against it absently. scott finds it suddenly unbearable to look at her, and watches the last of the invasive summer flies totter around the ceiling, creepy little legs sticking out at all angles. 

'I think what I was worried about was you thinking that I'm trying to negate my own problems by making you relive your own.'

'that's rather specific,' she says with some humour.

'I had time to think about it,' he shrugs, putting his hands behind his head. his mouth and throat felt dry and he knows that the nicotine just made everything worse, not better, although the very action of flicking the lighter ignition and holding it precariously to the carefully-rolled end of a cigarette calmed him down instantly. he isn't _addicted._ scott thinks nic addictions are bullshit. it's nowhere near hard enough to make you come back for more, it's just that it's legal, like alcohol, and readily accessible, and... and he enjoys it, and can't go a day without it, especially not now. whatever. whatever. _whatever_.

'I think the saddest I've ever been was when my brother died. that was pretty rough.'

'oh. yeah. of course. sorry, fuck, I -'

'but I was young, you know. I don't think I really got it at that age, but there's still this... unspecified irritation that stays with me.' 

'that makes sense. I mean, I didn't lose a brother, or anything, but... yeah. I get it. something's just left unsaid.'

'that nagging itch. unscratched.'

scott, by reflex, scratches his jaw, dragging his finger maybe a little too hard along the skin. it stings for a while after. 

-

lea's back to painting, but she's shelved the one of him and is working on one for a showcase coming up in october. scott wonders what his life would've been like at this point, had he settled for a career in printing and art and advertisements and not bothered chasing the fantasy of joining a band. how it'd all seemed so simple, in it's own maniacal way: mayhem and fun, rather than threatening and abusive. he snaps the waistband of his boxers against his hips, just to feel something. he's still smoking. he hates that, but is more startled by this self-contained disgust, as he's never felt so... _guilty,_ or _dirty_ about it before. he counts, snaps the elastic again, and lets it pass. 

'you know, I don't think you should beat yourself up so much about still feeling shitty about all that happened,' she comments from the stool, chewing the inside of her cheek and considering where best to put the dark pigment scott can see lathered over the grey bristles. he feels, sometimes, as if she can read his mind. 'it's only been a few months. you can be angry, or sad, or feel nothing at all.' 

'I think I'm all three.'

'well, there you go. these things often overlap. grief is a circular staircase.'

'what're the stages again?'

'oh, god. good question. denial... anger... depression? no, bargaining, then depression. then acceptance.' she mixes more colours on her palette with purpose. scott would like to feel purpose. 'so you'll reach acceptance eventually, I think. everyone does. I don't think you can _not_ get past it, in some way.'

'you just said it was a _circular staircase_.'

'a poet said that. you can't trust poets, of course, they feel everything in far too enigmatic a way.' 

'I think my problem is that I'm not enigmatic enough,' scott says, huffing a laugh weakly. it's bitter, like the taste on his tongue, and he recalls that he used to taste food in a different way to how he does now. that was always one of those stupid, luke-warm warnings on the cigarette cartons, not as shockingly noticeable as all the graphic images of rotten teeth or dead babies or mutilated oesophaguses, but noticeable in its perceived stupidity - loss of conventional taste. but, maybe, that side-effect was the most violent of all, in its own insidious, subtle, way. what does lea taste like to someone normal?

'I think far too many people are coveting their emotions these days. which colour for the background of this, blue-grey, or green-grey?'

-

the sun is beginning to set and they must've been in this position for hours. they're on their third carton of cigarettes collectively, and on their third vinyl to drown out the neighbours, and debating which one of the pair should have to get up to retrieve the limoncello or gin from the kitchen to make the night more interesting. 

'scott putesky, if you don't get your ass off of that bed and walk five feet to the kitchen, I'll make you walk five _minutes_ to the burger king and hit up that greasy kid for acid.'

'I don't think I will,' he returns, impishly.

'oh, so you put your foot down with _me,_ ' she teases, finishing up the second painting and wiping the drags of dried, colourful oil from her skin, stripping off the baggy beatles shirt impulsively bought at a goodwill for this very purpose - making a mess. she changes, crawling onto the bed and collecting him into her arms, as if holding him together, and settling with him in silence. 'I won't make jokes like that if you don't want me to.'

'it's fine. I think it's better if I have a sense of humour about it. I don't wanna be one of _those_ guys that bottles it and bottles it and ends up breaking something because he's so repressed.'

'again, specific, but I concur.'

he kisses the tip of her nose, massaging a breast beneath her shirt. she exhales into his shoulder. 

'why do you think it ended up the way it did?'

'power. money. frustration.' she rubs his jaw with her cheek, a feeling somehow similar yet opposite to the feeling of his nails scraping the skin, like a complimentary sensation. 'I think he wanted something so bad he was willing to do whatever to get it. you were enjoying it for a different reason than he was, and that didn't gel well.'

'I can see that.'

'I think the only way he knows how to exert power in a nasty way.'

'how d'you mean?' scott presses, feeling somewhat spoilt for pursuing an avenue he knows will only serve to piss him off more, and for what? some assumed closure, brought on by someone who meticulously distanced herself from the whole ordeal. but, he trusts her, enough to let her indulge his need to be plagued by this a moment longer. 

'his parents were cool, right? never really got authority there, so what's next? abusive, crazy teachers, classmates. that's how he learnt how to run a ship. everything he talked about going through in high school - I think that shaped him.'

scott nods, trailing his hand down from her chest to her waist. 

'that's presumptuous, but that's the jist I got from hanging around him. he's not as mysterious as he thinks. he actually lets quite a bit hang loose.' 

'what, figuratively, or literally?'

lea snorts, involuntarily. 'make of it what you will. do you want me to turn the vinyl over?'

'no, I'm comfortable. I'm happy listening to you. any more insights on my nightmare?'

lea clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and pats his side. 'only that for the longest time I thought I was being too gentle with you. now I realise everyone else was too rough.'

scott swallows and wishes he had the leverage to reach for another cigarette. something in him can't deal with this, and he wishes, _yearns,_ to be able to handle such influxes and nuances of emotion and sincerity. it had all but stopped feeling safe to do so, even after years of letting lea in. he's hardly left her out in the cold, but he's certainly turned the radiator off in the house, if only for the summer. literal summer is ending, though, he thinks, as he sees the sky darkening at an earlier hour, and smells the untraceable scent off fall in the room, whether it be the smell of the world outside, its dying leaves, or something synthetic and human within the house that he's grown to attribute to the most comfortable few months of them all.

'like goldilocks. I think you were always just right, though,' he finally says.

she sniffs. 'good. that's... good to know.'

he strokes her back, finally looking at the painting clipped into the easel. the skin of whoever she's painted has odd tones to it, all dark and green and sickly looking, but he likes it, and _feels_ something while looking at it. he hates art that doesn't inspire anything; but, anger's also an emotion, so maybe he can't truly hate whatever brian was planning on coming out with later in the year. he can't promise himself he won't feel anything by then. 

'who'd you paint?' 

'I have no idea. the reference is a still from a movie that estee took a picture of, I stole it from her coffee table, so I might have to give that back, but she hasn't missed it yet. I started it while you were still in new orleans.'

'I think I remember seeing the sketch when I came back down here in april.'

'yeah, that's right. I hate it to death now, though, I've looked at it too long. I just hope it sells and I never have to see it again.'

'that must be nice. having something sell, and it's just gone. you get the credit you deserve, and that's it. it doesn't plague you on the radio, or mtv, or on other people's shirts.' 

'yeah, but, within that, know that it's plaguing you because people love it. they love what you made. it's a different ball-game, scott.' 

he rolls his bottom lip between his teeth, looking at the postcards stuck to the wall above the bookcase of new york and vermont, the ones that lea liked to buy whenever they went to a new place to commemorate it. 'true.'

'maybe you should stop thinking about it, just for an evening. pretend it never happened.' 

'it lives with me everyday,' he tells her, and he wishes his voice wouldn't fucking _crack_ every time he had to verbalise it. 'it's so embedded. it's like I'm hardwired with the experience.'

'every experience 'hardwires' us in some way. we live life empirically.'

scott opens and closes his mouth a few times, futilely trying to articulate himself. his body shakes acutely but violently as the air chills in the room, sun no longer anywhere in the sky. lea must feel this, pulling the duvet up over the two of them and folding herself closer around him. 

'at the same time, I don't think I really felt anything at all, at that point. it's sort of hazy and confused and just one ugly, complicated mess that somehow feels so sour. I don't know how something so full of nothingness can feel this terrible.'

'I think what you're doing is coping. in a half-measures sort of way,' she suggests, and he becomes aware of her fingers travelling around his body again.

'I think I might've died if I didn't leave.'

'by who's hands?' she asks, almost as if it were she were taking it as a joke, and scott suddenly wishes that he actually had to think about this, had to consider the answer, or even that he had it in him to pretend that he hasn't dedicated any part of his days to thinking about this before; but when you're so isolated, what else is there to do? 

'my own, maybe.'

lea's hands leave his body, occupying themselves with her hair, and her eyes. scott thinks that maybe it was bad optics to tell her something like that. the duvet is hot, and a thin layer of sweat grows under his arms, but the incessant quivering of his body, tightening his sinewy muscles and skin against the cold, won't leave him. 


	13. when it burnt it smelt like you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> crime and punishment and breweries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> poor impulse control - part I

it's his second week in court, and he lets lea tie his tie. she asks him why, stood behind him as she watches her movements in the mirror, flipping extraneous lengths of fabric over another, mouth pressed to his shoulder. he can only shrug, though the truth is more akin to the fact that he can't will his hands to cooperate with his brain or his eyes anymore, as if the neural messages weren't carrying as far as they used to. he feels ashamed, to be so debased, but it's easy enough to pretend that nothing's wrong at all. 

'tell me something about your childhood,' he asks during her first re-tie, not satisfied with the way the knot around his neck bloats and hangs loose. 

'haven't you heard enough?' she contests.

'not until I've heard it all,' scott tells her, watching lea undo his tie for the second time, trying to even out the lengths of the back stretch and the front stretch. he fiddles with the red segments of his hair, carmine and deep against the box-dye black.

lea sighs, seemingly having decided on a memory. 

'my cats would always bring in blue jays and finches from the forests around my house - you know new rochelle, don't you? the woodland is so verdant and lush - and the poor birds would be in some state of lucidity. not always totally dead, but more cruel to keep them alive.

'well, sometimes the birds would be very much... alive.' she swallows here, tugging too hard on the tie. scott flinches. her grip loosens apologetically. 'they'd free themselves from margarita or behemoth's jaw with punctures in their stomach and fly around the hallway or the kitchen. it scared the shit out of me, and mom, but jaron loved it, and dad was never around to see it. 

'I remember the last time they ever brought a live bird in - that's a lie, the last time they brought a live bird in that _j_ _aron_ was alive to see. this grotesque, bloated, city pigeon that had flown however-many-miles up from manhattan to our little rural life. behemoth had it. it squirmed in his teeth, wrenched itself free, but left half of it's abdominal flesh in his mouth. he was just as freaked out as the rest of us were as it flew around and around the kitchen, its organs falling free of itself.' 

lea shudders, and fiddles with his tie again. 'you know, losing your liver and stomach and whatever else; and then having your large intestine hang out like a noose really tires you out. so this thing was shitting all over the place, and eventually crash-landed in the sink. thank god it was stainless steel. the blood and pus and mess was quite abundant,' she tells him with a little laugh. scott reaches up to the knot of his tie, hoping that his and her twitching fingers coincide - and they do, wrapping together with the red, pattered fabric in the middle of their flesh, intwined. their joints crush together and hook uncomfortably in a beatific moment.

'well, that was pretty fucked up,' he grins, measuring up the lengths of his tie. they're perfect, finally.

'it's probably why I am the way that I am.' she rolls his earlobe gently, well-meaningly, between her teeth. 

'I think you're seeing yourself all wrong,' he says by way of explanation, shivering at the pressure on his cartilage. unconsciously, he rubs his arms beneath the the diaphanous fabric of his blouse, a deep slate-grey and bunching around the dips in his elbows. he's thin. very thin. only now does he realise that he had recently been thinking that he wasn't so, not anymore, certainly not the lithe being he was about eight years ago - but he is what he is. his blithe approach to reaching the age of thirty seldom settled nicely with the bemoaning the decade, and the subsequent ages, got from the people around him, worried about becoming wrinkled and flabby and grey. he is, currently, none of the three transgressions against aestheticism (nor is lea, though she has a further two years to escape her twenties, and she still gets carded in bars). maybe what comes with thirty is an acceptance, a serenity, more of a mental state than a physicality. though scott doesn't have this, either. he thinks of the court room. their faces. his old friends, people he somewhat trusted. it smells of antiquity. he takes lea's hands away from his body.

'how should I be seeing myself?'

'as I see you,' he says simply, not without an understanding how dissatisfying his answer is.

she strokes her thumb around the edge of his eye socket. 'give me your eyes, then,' she teasingly implores, and he's reminded of a comic from the anthology that she's just published - what was that one again? something about a melon baller. and then there was the one about beastiality with roadkill, and the one based on her friend from the dance academy, shattering every bone in her leg into each other. the bird's entrails aren't the reason she is the way she is, but her collection of drawings certainly paint a better picture. 

scott forces his mouth to portray something contented, and the twinging pain in his stomach returns, this time on the left side of his torso, crippling his ramrod-straight posture.

-

'will there be a settlement, do you think?' 

lea tries to ask him intelligent questions in the car ride home every evening. by then he's tired and his bones ache and he wants to scream until he can't speak without his throat tasting metallic, but he answers her anyway, because she's trying to be nice and cause a diversion, which is more than a lot of people in his life are trying to do at the moment. he watches each headlight on the highway approach the car, growing thicker and eventually disappearing into the doorframe of the car, replaced by an identical pole. he counts them, up to forty-three, and gets bored thereafter.

'you know him. I don't think so. he wants to rail me until I give up, which I won't.'

'you won't,' she agrees, not angrily, but firmly. 'you're better than that. the longer this drags, the more money he makes - the more of _your_ money he makes, and -'

'yes, lea, I know,' scott snaps, and regrets it instantly, but he won't apologise, because maybe he can't; maybe he doesn't have the words.

lea drives a few miles more. she pulls over three lanes to drag the car up the incline to the traffic lights, the final seven minutes - scott always counts - to their home. the light is red when they get there, and seems to stay that way for years. 

'sorry.'

'me too.'

the light turns green again, and they carry on along the roads, sparsely decorated with other cars blocking their path back to the house. they pass the brewery, and the bars still heaving with people, and the serve-yourself restaurant they always talk about visiting but never do for lack of time, and willingness. 

'do you want to do anything, before we get home?' 

scott thinks about this on a surface level, not letting the ideas implant themselves too deeply in his mind. he cannot commit to anything, he tells himself. there's another day in court tomorrow. he has to read his rights tonight, pulling all-nighters like he did in high school, in college. I shouldn't have to be fucking studying at thirty years old, he thinks, bitterly. he knows, however, it'll all be better if he does, as if this all rests on him, as if this is all his fault; and maybe it is. 

'I'm okay. I'd rather go to bed.'

'okay. that's okay.'

lea drives on dutifully, and gets them home in record time. they say nothing to each other as she readies for bed, lingering in doorways in a black nighty, trying, he knows, to entice him to bed as if everything was normal. but nothing is normal, not anymore, so he looks at her through his hair and smiles briefly, dismissively - cruelly, even - and she leaves, leaving him to his reading and note taking, a futile task, as nothing applies to him or helps him even remotely. 

he closes the books he'd acquired from his lawyers (they'd donned him with them glibly, pretending that they were any use at all as scott had grown difficult in the previous few months, alienating the professionals in a twisted, misdirected revenge initiative, wondering what brian must've felt to push him out, to disregard the real, as scott saw it, professional in the conglomerate). he feels his eyes burn and blear, and he just wants to go to sleep, rather than see out another fit of anger or sadness or numbness. scott lowers his forehead to the cool cover of the textbook, glossy and creased with white veins creeping up the length of it where it had been cracked. he considers masturbating, just for an added dose of depravity; to be sad and to pretend as if he were lonely and without companionship as he was in college, making do with shallow one-night stands that he didn't have to attend to like the growing garden of trials and tribulations and love and hatred and wild oscillations of feeling and meaning and gestures. he thinks of this garden and smiles, at some point falling into unconsciousness on the table, waking up some hours later with a pillow between his head and the table, a scratchy blanket thrown over him, and the top few buttons of his dress shirt undone. 


	14. where the rain can't get in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> riot grrrls, fatigue, makeup, and the correct way to shop at a corner store

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1998, I'm totally in love with how he looked when he was with JOJ so I had to write somethinggg. I worked on this one for so long, my god! I deleted half the work on accident a few days ago so sorry if there's any mistakes earlier on that I may have amended in that edit. <3

scott can hear the opening act's cacophony through the thin walls of his dressing room - not that he's paying much attention, far too occupied with staring blankly at his face, a face he doesn't recognise - being so pale and framed in colours which still weren't strange enough to be familiar to him, but also not as _normal_ as he'd envisaged himself looking by this point in time - in the wide, arching mirror embellished with spherical light fixtures which read as nothing other than garish. digressing, he looks at the makeup at his disposal, splayed out chaotically over the vanity, unused and all the more frightening for it. he looks back at himself. then at the makeup. himself. makeup. it has to go on at some point, lest he have jess breathing down his neck about image and cleaving to the docket. 

'knock, knock,' a familiar voice intones, accompanied by the door cracking open and two belated knocks. 'is mr. putesky in? I have his coke and whores.'

'very funny,' he drones, extending an arm outwards from where he sits to wrap her in a hug. when she pulls away, she's almost scrutinising his face.

'no makeup?' she enquires, though he knows that his lack of cosmetics isn't the thing at the forefront of her mind, rather more of a segue into something else she'd discovered on his face.

he shrugs, picking up an eyeliner pencil and rolling it between his fingertips. 

'you seem... off,' she tells him after a while, as if he can't feel it. 

'I'm just not in the mood for all this. not right now.' 

lea frowns, dragging a swivel chair out from under the desk on the other side of the room and sitting herself beside him. they look at each other in the mirror.

'I can do your makeup, if you like.' 

scott stops thinking for a little, cauterising the unspecified pit of dread ruminating in his mind, and nods his concession.

'wonderful. what's the colour scheme?'

he gestures to a palette of warm, fiery eyeshadow shades. 'red, y'know, so at least there's some harmony going on here,' he mumbles, gesturing to his face and hair.

lea only tuts at his self-effacement as she pops open the plastic container, putting the tray to his face to approximate the best tone. 

'how about this, it's a little bit pinker.'

she focuses, packing the powder onto the flat-headed brush which had broken in half years ago, but was still the best at its job. lea holds his face gently as she brushes it across his lid, dragging it out to a point beyond the ridge of his eye socket. he lets his neck lose its long-held tension and leans into her palm.

‘I think the red’s a good colour on you,’ she mutters to herself, moving on to the other eye. ‘sort of nicer on the eye than the green.’ 

'yeah,' he agrees, turning in the chair to observe her work. 'I can't look at that colour anymore.'

she presses her lips to his forehead, creasing in anxiety. 'it'll come. don't you look pretty?'

he can't help but grin at her tone as she gently squeezes his face, looking over her work. 'what next? foundation? eyebrows? lipstick?'

'all of the above. I feel better already,' he says, though even he doesn't believe the irony in his voice. 

'prettiest girl at the abattoir,' she declares, popping open the stick of milk-white foundation with a flourish. 

-

she dutifully and tentatively applies the rest of the gels and powders and pencils at their disposal, commenting on how much better he pulled off certain looks than her, to which he'd grab the tool or applicator out of her hands and force a smear of colour onto her own face to prove her otherwise - a dance of theirs that neither of them know how it originated or what the purpose was; secretly, though, they both thought that spurring the other into proving to them that they looked good was an effective way of invigorating each other, and, of course, it works every time.

as lea moves onto his lips, somebody knocks harshly on the door and snaps that he has fifteen minutes until he needs to be out and in the hallway. he jumps at the sudden intrusion, narrowly escaping lea smearing the raspberry-red gloss down his chin. 

'christ, scott.'

'sorry, sorry,' he rushes out, pulling her hand back to his mouth. 'still not one-hundred-percent with getting shouted at in concert venues, you know.'

'I know,' she tells him, dragging the stick across his bottom lip once more and motioning for him to rub the pigmentation in between his lips. 'this isn't like before, though. right?'

'right,' he says, though, again, he isn't so sure he believes that, either. _oh, well. it's one less thing for her to worry about, especially when it comes to me._

he gets further entrenched in this erroneous internal monologue as she packs away the makeup, singing to herself as she usually does, though it wasn't such a common occurrence when she'd first met him. it hadn't even been that way until halfway through their relationship, when something clicked in her that she still won't explain, or maybe can't explain, and she started opening the curtains every day and stopped wearing ill-fitting clothes, and made art on art on _art,_ and, though scott himself can't explain why this particular thing felt so indicative of something better and enlightened about her, she stopped humming or whispering songs to herself, but rather just came out with it all, in the kitchen or in the car, even in a price chopper or a goodwill. scott likes that. scott likes how she kisses his face, any and all parts of it, whenever he spaces out, or gets annoyed or upset about whatever may be ruffling his feathers and needs to be reminded that he's loved and isn't completely alone. scott likes how samoa girl scout cookies end up on the kitchen counter from time to time without an explanation. scott likes how she does these sorts of things for him, how she makes him look and feel good on her own merit, even when he's being dastardly and mopey about it.

scott likes _her_.

'I like you.'

she jumps, nearly dropping her _I ♥︎ hello kitty_ makeup bag (bought ironically for her by scott in a manhattan market, but now loved for its chaotic iconography), printed in variegated colours in a julian opie-esque collage, as she does so - scott finally recalls how the eyeshadow brush was damaged the first time, in transit from a dressing room in new orleans to a mini van that scott was very nearly not allowed in, on account of jeordie's drunken polemics. 

'just like?'

'and love. but they're different things, aren't they? different feelings. different requirements.'

her hands still over the zipper, biting her cheek. 

'I guess they are, aren't they? I can think of some people that I love, but they're real pains in the ass. is that what you mean?'

'that's exactly it.'

'well,' she starts, straddling him on the canvas chair. 'I'm glad I fulfil both categories.'

'how could you not?'

'sometimes I worry. and wonder.'

'about what?' he asks, painfully aware of how close her face is hanging next to his. her breath is hot and smells of coffee, but it hasn't soured yet. he resists breaking the tension. that was the fun part, the sensation of magnets being pushed together at like ends. 

'that I'll end up like the rest of them. other people that've touched your life. people from your high school - ' she runs a hand through his hair, pulling on it. everything in him stirs. she _knows_ what she's doing. 'brian - ' _pull_. 'jeordie - ' both hands, now - 'all the rest,' she almost doesn't manage half of the phrase, mouth occupied with his own, hands crawling down his purplish dress shirt, fingers wrapping around the glittery tie. 

she has to pull away to adjust herself more comfortably on the chair, a lull in which he tells her he loves her, desperately and breathlessly, almost with complete abandon. it's not a usual declaration, something about this feels different; it's not that the other times he hasn't meant it, but maybe it's that this time he means it in a different light. lea must know this too from the way she stares down at him.

'I think you've got too much lipstick on,' she says, snapping out of whatever mood she'd been in. folding a tissue from the countertop into a small triangle, she starts towards his mouth with the facet but she stops herself, a seditious look crossing her face. 

'what now?' scott huffs with feigned irritation, nonetheless walking his fingers up her torso beneath her blouse, the satin material falling about his knuckles in cold waves.

'well - considering it's mine - maybe we could return it to me.'

scott cottons on. 'like, retroactively?'

'yeah. something like that.'

there's a beat of silence and the crowd boos on the other side of the wall. scott doesn't even feel bad for the warm-up act, too preoccupied with a swirling pool of heat cutting through his body. 

she looks over her shoulder to the leather couch in the middle of the room. it's a putrid brown and god knows what's happened on it up until this point, but... it's a place to lie down, scott figures, and a chance to do something maybe a bit more... indicative of his profession. 

'would you like me to recompense you on _that,'_ he whispers, throwing a finger in the direction of the couch. 

'mm,' she starts. 'it'll do.' 

a banging at the door, again. 'ten minutes!'

lea turns back to him and rolls her eyes. 'fuck that,' she whispers.

'lea, I can't get shoved out of another band - '

'ugh, my god. we better make quick work of this then, haven't we?'

he bites his lip from sheer frustration, simultaneously wanting her weight off of his crotch but also never wanting her to leave. he nods quickly, and she slips away, popping each button of the blouse cripplingly slowly, tastefully. 

'by my estimation, we've only got eight and a half minutes now.'

scott's legs buckle, and he has her on the couch, dozens of people milling around just outside and prone to burst in and complain about the warm-up act or the venue, and hundreds of people on the other side of that, screaming and cheering and booing, totally oblivious to what was happening just on the other side of the stage. something about that is incredibly empowering to scott, like he finally has something that other people don't, and maybe never will have. whether it be playing music in front of thousands, playing _his_ music, showing off; or touring from one facet of the country to the next; or dropping acid in a dressing room with no repercussions; being doted on at every corner, because _you're_ the talent, _you're_ the viable product, and you are (despite this not being true for scott thus far) untouchable. or, in a more simple vein, it's lea that he, and only he, has to himself. 

she hooks a leg over his waist and manoeuvres scott beneath her, riding up on the seat of his crotch as she bites down on his neck. he whimpers, weaving his fingers into her hair and jutting his hips forward. 

'we're running out of time - what're you gonna do about it?' she mutters into his ear, her lips dragging on his earlobes. 

'what do _you_ want me to do about it?'

she shrugs, almost innocently, acting as if she had to think about it at all. 'make me finish in five minutes.'

scott flits his fingers to his fly and shifting the pinstriped fabric down to pool at his knees, the underwear following, as lea hitches her skirt up above her hips. 

'you're so fucking pretty,' he exhales, eyes traversing the flesh he can see and moving his hands to pinch her nipples, savouring her shivering, then trailing them down her sides and pressing them into the divots in her hips.

_'et_ _tu,'_ she smiles, pushing herself onto him, rolling her hips around his cock and revelling in his begs, and moans, and whines. 

-

lea watches him perform, pressed right up against the metal barrier, marginally avoiding the slam-dancers to her right. she loves how he moves, and plays, and purposefully catches her eye flirtatiously before trying to execute some over-complicated guitar manoeuvre which he invariably lands. his red hair whips around, clung to the sticky lipstick and light swatch of mascara; lea finds herself proud of her work, but far more proud of the person wearing it. she almost gets emotional, cut short by witnessing a man grab a woman by the back of her hair and spit blood into her mouth. lea watches in disgust, jessicka vaguely addressing it before launching into another polemic of a song. lea half wonders if she should be more like jess, or robin, or even claudia, sort of outgoing and vulgar, and happy to cover themselves in blood and fluids and flaunt their sexuality comfortably, until scott finally meets her eye once more and gives her a wink, the feeling of being railed earlier returning and affirming her that she needn't be anything more to him than she already is. she grins back, taking a picture of him for later, wanting to run her fingers beneath the glittery, red v-neck and take him all over again on another decrepit, old couch. he seems happier, she muses, hardly aware that the show was ending.

-

the fluorescent lights of the convenient store worsen the drowsiness resulting from plummeting down from the adrenaline rush of being on stage - scott pushes the cart around the store, leant against the bar as his body can't hold itself up anymore. 

'that was a good show,' lea says from where she sits in the body of the cart, sucking on the head of a strawberry lollipop she'd plucked from the rack at the front of the store and promptly unwrapped, popping her lips around it. scott wants to tell her not to tease him like that, not after the frustrating five-minute endeavour before the show that all but left the pair of them high and dry, but he's enjoying the dull stirring of arousal in his spaced-out state. his sunglasses drop down the length of his nose, exposing his drooping eyelids to an even more extreme magnitude of brightness. 

'yeah, I felt good about it.' he watches her reach up to the shelf of cereal they're passing, plucking a box from the shelf and holding it to her chest. 'I thought we were here for provisions.'

'lucky charms are a provision. sorry that you're boring.'

scott stifles a laugh, pulling away from the cart and leaving her in the middle of the aisle, waving over his shoulder.

'oh, just where the fuck are you going? putesky!' 

'to get my _boring_ provisions,' he calls from the end of the aisle, watching her shakily standing up in the cart to get herself out, pushing her weight too hard on one side and spinning the cart towards the shelves, knocking some of the laminated price-tags off of the brackets. 

'I'm too drunk to deal with this,' he hears her shout as he scours the small cabinet of booze in the back corner of the store, pulling out a case of beer from the cooler before putting it back and focusing on the incessant beeping coming from the scanners at the front of the store. he moves to the wine shelves, running his fingers along the plain bottles of merlot and chardonnay with pretty labels and finally finding the gratuitously-packaged bottles of champagne. 

as he's so reluctant to do these days, he pulls his wallet out of the dress trousers and thumbs through bills he'd manage to pilfer from here and there, figuring he has just enough to splurge on something like this, with some to spare. he takes one with silver foil and blue printing, his thumb catching the metallic paper too hard and nearly tearing the seal from the cork. 

-

'you didn't _have_ to buy champagne,' she tells him once they're outside the store, sharing a cigarette underneath the flickering neon sign advertising the store's twenty-four-hour service. 'not until you bankrupt that asshole, anyway,' she tacks on, under her breath, still unwilling to utter _his_ name. 

scott shrugs, extending his hand to pluck the skinny white roll from her lips, their two shades of lipstick melding together on the end. scott thinks that it's quite romantic, in an unconventional, my-girlfriend-and-I-are-dependent-on-nicotine-and-we-share-our-makeup sort of romanticism. 'we haven't done anything splurge-y in a while. I thought it'd be nice. I think I'm finally in an okay place with myself. I'd like to, you know. commemorate,' he tries.

she hugs him, the corner of the cereal in the plastic bag, plastered with an ombre of red _thank you_ 's written across the material, poking into his side. he throws the cigarette off the curb and looks up at the sky, looking past the hazy light of the city providing a polluted barrier between them and the clear night. when his eyes eventually adjust, he's struck with just how many stars there are up there (like, _christ,_ he thinks, that's totally ridiculous - but it's a feeling of sublimity, bordering on uncanniness, that sparks this reaction). how did it all fit, with room to spare for all of them? it's best not to ask, he tells himself, remembering some throw-away line from paradise lost about not occupying yourself with the how and why, but more with the what. 

'your heart's going quite fast.' 

'oh?' he manages, laying his palm flat to his chest, feeling all the wrinkles in the shirt beneath his fingers. where's his tie? a problem for a more lucid version of himself. 

'yeah. I don't know. I thought that was important. that maybe you should know.' she wrinkles her nose, looking up at him with her chin planted on his sternum. 'but, then again, the thing's in your body, so I guess you must know about it. I'm just being reductive.'

'no,' he tells her. 'I couldn't feel it at all.'

she interprets this in whichever way she does, a private smile crossing her face, an expression that somehow doesn't match her eyes.


	15. ivory lines lead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> juggling is hard enough when the things in your hands are concrete, objective - but what about abstract concepts, and names, and faces, and places? we'll find out.

on new year's eve jess throws a party, and invites just about everybody she could think to invite. to her credit, lea reasons, she is apologetic when she sees scott seize up at the extensiveness of the guest list, and assures him, and will, time and time again in the four days leading up to the party, that he can easily blend into the crowd, and avoid anybody he needs to. 

'why can't you just fucking uninvite them?' lea snaps one night, the very night before, at costco with jess as they pick out heavily-sweetened bottles of schnapps with egregious flavourings. 

'because,' she starts, pushing a bottle with frosted glass covered in little, cartoonish limes into lea's hands for approval. 'diplomacy. I can't piss anyone off.' 

'can't, or won't?'

'lea, you care about him, I know, but he's also pushing thirty. I could make this whole thing less uncomfortable for him, sure, but it wouldn't be good for anyone.'

lea grumbles and puts the bottle in the cart in and amongst the mixers and loose oranges, the puckered skin glinting up at her with reflections of the harsh lighting from above. she feels like being belligerent but falls short of articulating any sort of argument. 

'you understand, right, lea?'

'I guess.'

'he needs to know how to deal with it. he's got a long life ahead of him,' jess says, casting her arm into the open air. 'he'll encounter these people again, and again. mutual friends, and all.'

she gestures to herself, smiling, and lea finds it in herself to smile, too. 'fine. I acquiesce. I just don't like seeing him -'

'like he was when I told him they'd all rsvp'd?'

'- yeah. that.'

'look, lea, it'll be fine. maybe it'll do him some good. hey,' jess grins, 'he could completely have it out with them. cause a scene. I wouldn't give a fuck.'

'that isn't very conducive to _diplomacy_.'

'yeah it is. I'm not the one inciting it. scott is, or brian, or that bastard jeordie.'

lea gives her a peripheral glance as they reach the checkout, their basket shallowly filled with booze and fruit. 'the unwitting host.'

'exactly,' jess agrees, packing things onto the conveyer belt.

-

'she said you could pummel them to death if they give you any problems.'

scott peers up at her dubiously as he buttons his shirt. 'did she actually say that? verbatim?'

'well, no,' lea admits, motioning for him to zip up her dress. 'but it was implied that she wouldn't care if you did.'

it's four p.m. and already dark, though the sky was turning deep blues imperceptibly later than a few days before. lea watches the clouds stagger past as she redoes her hair, feeling scott sat still on the bed behind her. 

'you okay?' she dares to ask, running a brush through her eyelashes in the vanity.

'it's just the first time I've been deliberately stuck in the same... vicinity... as _all_ of them, you know. I feel like something's gonna go wrong.'

she turns at looks at him pulling gently on the hem of his shirt on the edge of the bed. closing the curtains, she crawls onto the mattress next to him, taking his hand.

'absolutely. it could be your worst nightmare. but, scott,' she says, dragging a knuckle along his jaw to guide his face to her own. 'it's one night, one jarring conversation, at most, and then it's over. if you're lucky, none of them want to speak to you either.'

'that's not how they operate, and you know it. they _enjoy_ making their hangups someone else's problem. their whole prerogative is fucking with people.'

lea runs a hand along his thigh. 'I know. but you can do your best to avoid that whole scene, yeah? I'm sure there's other people there that loathe those guys.'

'oh, tell me about it,' he manages to joke, sticking a hand through his hair, the lighter shades of red bursting to the surface. 'and I have you, and jess... yeah. it's fine. it'll be fine.'

'yeah?'

scott swallows thickly, and nods, though with some apprehension; some difficulty. 'yeah. maybe. I don't know. when does this thing start?'

'two hours,' lea tells him, retracing where his hand had previously stroked through the stands of his hair and holding onto the ends. she bumps her nose to his, tenderly. 'we can cancel if you really want.' 

'I don't. I don't want to blow off jess, either.'

'no, neither do I,' lea admits, biting her cheek. 'maybe they won't even shown up. that's sort of their thing, isn't it?

scott sighs. 'lea, baby, I don't know. we won't know for another two hours, so...'

'so?'

'I don't know. let's talk about something else, like... like, I don't know. just something else.'

she gives his knee a squeeze, her stomach churning with an unplaceable sort of guilt. 

-

song after song lurches through chords and chorus and choral but the progression of the mixtape doesn't align with scott's stunted attitude towards the party. he stands firmly by the record player, watching the needle slide along each divot and dent in the vinyls as they get changed over frequently and erratically by people complaining about the disc they were replacing, from the smiths to the revolting cocks to his own music, all changed by people he faintly recognised. they smile awkwardly at scott, not quite meeting his eye, but staring at somewhere above his forehead, a gesture that made him fold even further into himself. what's more, he's lost lea to the thrum of the crowd and her old friends' sudden need to catch-up, all these years later. 

leaning backwards, he hits the arm of the plush, red chair in the corner of the room, the plastic leaves of the fake houseplant crawling jaggedly along the back of his head. he watches the party from where he perches, a lackadaisical congregation of people in the already cramped living room of a one-bedroom apartment (though, scott thinks as a kmfdm song starts up beside him, that horrible beige-marl couch folds out into a futon, and he wonders what the likelihood of him having to stay the night is). the song plays through, and he feels nothing; he finishes his drink, and feels nothing; he looks through the crowd for any and all faces that spark some sort of excitement, or dread, within him, and, again, he comes up dry. 

his instincts tell him to integrate himself (it might make him less noticeable than being the sore thumb in the peripheral of everyone's detached observances, after all) but something won't let him budge, like a weight crushed against his legs. his knees jerk in agitation, and he wishes it wasn't like this. there's nothing about this situation that he attributed to his thirties when he was a teenager, or even a naive ten years ago, right before any of this mess catalysed, when he was still in school. would a boring, printing career have hurt? in some ways; but as much as this had? probably not. scott, finding himself tired of his own thoughts, traipses through the apartment, slipping through the dredges of people and returning drunken, inebriated _heyyy, man_ 's to try and find at least one person he's comfortable with. 

the kitchen is adjacent to the living room, and sparsely populated. finally, he catches lea against the island counter with a plastic cup in hand, looking bored as a girl scott recognises from one of her showcases talks at her - but, worse, still, he sees stephen by the fridge, his head stuck in the pale light of the appliance. scott swallows thickly. who first?

he walks past lea, his hand landing in the crook of her elbow, though he doesn't know whether it's so much a comfort for her or for himself. 

'stephen?'

nothing.

'pogo.'

nothing.

stephen, his friend (he'd thought, obviously erroneously), shuts the door gently, taking one glance at scott, before rejoining the flow of people in the hallway through the door leading out of the kitchen. he stands, his hipbone digging painfully into the sharp corner of the counter, a little more than aghast as lea appears beside him, arm threading through his own.

'what the fuck - '

'don't. it isn't worth it,' she tells him. he feels her lips press into the gentle spot of skin above his elbow. 'do you want to go?'

scott takes a while to snap out of it and return to the room. when he does, his eyes focus in on the fridge, the spot he'd just been staring at as he'd been glared at from and been told everything he needed to know without any words having been exchanged at all. his fingers begin to numb and twitch, aggravating him with the incessant feeling until he suffocates them in the pockets of his trousers. in there, the tips of his fingers thread around an orange lighter, rubbing the plastic coating a few times like a twisted genie in a bottle.

'yeah. yeah, I do, actually.'

-

they sit on the bridge overlooking the scarcely-used train tracks, a few feet further in the air than they had been in their twenties before the metal reinforcements were tacked onto the faded brick in a rather ugly, brutalist, fashion. everybody likes to pretend that they don't know what the four-foot metal blocks are there for, though, of course, the jokes were always made, and the implication was always thought of; even more so, scott thinks, now that he realises how easy it is to scramble your way up the blockades if you're steadfast enough. he considers, if you're really set on hurting yourself, you'll always find a way to do it. 

but, that isn't what tonight's about. lea's still sipping from the seemingly-bottomless plastic cup of wine, passing it to him every once in a while, looking straight ahead at the pathetic lights of the two platforms that made up the station, the soft yellow of the streetlamp just about illuminating the worm-eaten wood of the shelters that looked as if they'd been thrown together as an after-thought a century ago. no, tonight's more about... scott isn't sure, but he's determined to make it more about life than the latter.

'fuck them, you know,' lea eventually says.

'yeah.' scott swigs the wine, realising that they're down to their last dregs. 'fuck them,' he agrees, though not with much conviction.

'at least it was just one. and it was a total non-confrontation.'

scott winces. he can hear a train trundling up the tracks from the other side of the bridge. 'I don't know if I would've preferred that to an all-out argument, actually. something about that feels worse, somehow.'

'like it's a little more than explosive anger?'

'that, and that it's still so bad after almost three years.'

'shit, yeah.' he watches her roll her bottom lip between her teeth, scratching something along her cheekbone. 'what're you doing about the tour?'

scott laughs humourlessly. 'I was wondering when you'd ask. I'm leaving. I haven't told jess yet, so...'

'alright. I'll keep shtum.'

the train passes, forcing a gust of resistive wind in their direction. scott grips the sharp edge of the metal block tightly, pressing the contours of his palm into the solid ridge until it twinges in pain. 

'thank you.'

a few fireworks go off in the distance, spewing above the rooftops of houses that scott would never know the intricacies of. the glowing protrusions against the black sky appear largely colourless, the white of the fizzling spires ringing futile against the rest of the world that he can see; shadows of thick, lifeless trees on either side of him, the minutia of people crawling home along the sidewalks, the menacing spikes of the gate that guards the field beyond the station. 

'do you think it's midnight yet?' lea asks.

'probably,' scott acquiesces. 'happy new year,' he tells her, looking down at her to find her already looking up. 

she pushes a strand of hair behind his ear, and he kisses her while she’s distracted.

'happy new year.'


	16. maybe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the indescribable moments of our lives, tonight

'do you ever look at it all and feel humbled?'

scott stands in the centre of her patio, feet just grazing the damp grass. she looks at his back, just a cut-out shape in the darkness.

'I suppose. I mainly look at it all and feel weak, insignificant.'

he turns around minutely. 'I think you're seeing it all wrong.'

scott doesn't look at her, but keeps his eyes fixed on the sky that looks empty to her, seemingly to holding his attention with whatever glittering attire it presents. the longer she looks, however, the more decorated it gets; the empty space above all of the rooftops becoming deliberately scattered with flowers as a field grows populated with small daisies or dandelions. 

'they're all dead, you know,' she tells him, cramming herself into one of the lawn chairs and cracking open her drink. 

'that doesn't matter. there's new stars in their place, we'll hardly ever notice.' 

'don't you ever feel, maybe, conned? like, that bright one, right in the middle,' she stretches her arm up, though he isn't following her direction, 'isn't what's there now. maybe a weaker one is. maybe your great, great, great, a thousand-times great, grandchildren won't see anything there at all.'

'that doesn't matter to me, does it? it's all about what _we_ see.'

she recoils a little, though she doesn't know why. she sips at the can, spurring her mind to perceive more and more twinkling lights in the sky. some move, some stay stationary, some move with flashing green and red lights and she knows that they're airplanes but there's an equally exciting mysticism to imagine them as ufos, or one of those other things that scott always excitedly talks about after they watch one of _those_ movies. she smiles at the sky, acutely aware that her eyes are stinging with something unexplainable. 

'I suppose. what if there isn't a future, though? what if this is our last gasp.'

'why wouldn't there be a future?' scott presses.

her back crushes further into the rattan furniture, trying to take in all of the sky, even beyond the tops of the garage and the house and the neighbours' invasive roofs. 'we're ruining our planet. for everyone that's made it better, there's about a dozen trying to take it all away from us.'

'oh, well, I don't disagree with _that,_ ' he starts, magnanimously, certainly not as he means to go on. 'but I just think that it's fascinating. I wonder if anybody out there sees our sun like I'm looking at their home star. everyone has a home star, don't you think?'

lea shrugs against the stiff arm of the chair, feeling all of her muscles contract. 'I guess. maybe some evolved without. I think it's a necessity that things evolve and develop.'

scott shifts to look at another part of the sky, and the orange street light hits the side of his face. lea smiles, though her lip quivers. 

'do you really think there's life beyond us?' he asks.

'what, more colossal fuck-ups?'

'maybe, maybe not. maybe they were better than us all along.'

'maybe,' she agrees, concealing the wavering in her tone. 

they sit in quietus a few minutes longer - it may as well be hours upon hours. lea considers what invisible object is orbiting that star, this star, whether that's a satellite or a plane. she thinks, maybe, if there's a little metal can hurtling just above the earth at a god-forsaken mileage-per-hour, then maybe, just maybe, everyone down here will be just alright; but, then again, everything's subjective. 

'isn't it amazing, what we've set out to do?'

'like what?' she asks.

'like, we endeavoured to put things in space, people on the moon, maybe people on mars. taking pictures of the farthest reaches of our galaxy. that's what I like most about looking at the stars.'

'what's that?'

'that we see different facets of our universe. we'll never reach, you know, planet b-seventy-two-x-y, but we can see its star. we have a little piece of that part of our collective world. seeing is believing.'

she tips her head back, looking at a star to give that name to. lea decides that it's the scientists' job, and her sole duty is to just consume this natural piece of media as she consumes movies and tv and books and shitty music videos on mtv. she grips the arms of the chair. 'in a way, yeah. it's a little insight into a world beyond our imagination. doesn't the distance ever frustrate you?'

scott finally looks around to her, and she can just about perceive his profile in the darkness. she loves the fact that her eyes can change perspective in a heartbeat, she loves what her body can do, maybe. maybe it isn't all so bad.

'not so, not so much. I've got no distance between myself and some pretty lovely things - ' he turns his body towards her now, hands stuffed self-effacingly in the pockets off his jacket. 'some things that maybe the other beneficiaries of our galaxy look to the sky and long for.'

she grins and shakes her head. 'I hate that,' she tells him, teasingly. 

'yeah, well,' he starts, looking away again, casting a final look to the sky before going back into the warmth and light of their house. 'I mean it. it's not as bad as you think it is.' 


End file.
